The sorceresses in the SPF Mat/Pat/Guardian compilation are organized by element: first by single-element specialists, then dual-element focused builds, and lastly others, which comprises unusual and creative variants as well as three-element "archmages." As you read our sorceress success reports, you might observe that many players like to have a "spammable" attack skill (without any enforced timeouts between casts) that they can use between casts of hard-hitting but time-delayed skills. Not all players build their spellcasters like this, but it seems to be a relatively common practice.
Every cold-based attack spell either chills (slows) or freezes (immobilizes) the enemy it hits, for some specific cold- or freeze-duration. A chilled monster moves and attacks at half its usual speed. Please note that all of the chill and freeze durations that will be mentioned below apply to normal difficulty. In nightmare difficulty, these durations are cut in half, and in hell, these durations are reduced by 75%. Cold-immunes are never chilled nor frozen by one of these cold attacks. Also, some enemies, such as death lords, lightning spires, etc. won't be chilled, even though they aren't cold-immune.
Frost Nova
There are only two spammable "area-of-effect" cold damage sorceress skills, and Frost Nova is one of them. The ring of cold expands to about eight yards (24 terrain tiles) away. Every enemy struck by the expanding ring is chilled. At skill level one, the chill effect lasts for eight seconds, and each additional skill level adds another second to the chill duration - for example, 24 seconds at level 17, or 36 seconds at level 29. Frost Nova costs 9 mana at skill level one, and one more mana per higher skill level (for example, it costs 25 mana at skill level 17, or 37 mana at level 29).
Frost Nova also causes cold damage to every enemy in its range. At skill level one, 2-4 cold damage, and slightly increasing returns at higher levels: 19-25 at level nine, 44-54 at level 17, 69-82 at level 23, 100-116 at level 29. Each synergy skill point spent in Blizzard and Frozen Orb adds ten percent to this damage, so a fully synergized level 29 Frost Nova does 500-580 damage. With enough faster-cast-rate on equipment, a sorceress can spam Frost Novas several times per second. As with all cold skills, Cold Mastery is another way to increase Frost Nova's cold damage.
To my mind, Frost Nova appeared to be more effective as a defensive spell (chilling and slowing enemies) than as an offensive damage dealer. Nevertheless, there were seven that maxed the skill and turned it into a capable offensive tool. Two sorceresses by sirpoopsalot,
FrigidBridgett and
Athena, maxed FN
and both synergies. Each also had a (distinct) backup fire attack, skilled up sufficiently to be useful. They are both worthwhile reading, because sirpoopsalot carefully and thoroughly explained how these sorceresses succeeded with their high-powered Frost Novas. Both of the synergies are timered (not-spammable) skills; however, both Blizzard and Frozen Orb are reasonably strong even without their respective synergies, so a fully synergized Frost Nova sorceress effectively has three cold attacks, and each can each be situationally effective monster killers.
The other five sorceresses that maxed this skill were "dual nova" builds, with Nova's lightning damage as their primary skill and partially synergized Frost Nova as a backup: Muktuk's
Supernova, Skinnyy's
SuperNova, Jaedhann's
OOps, bcoe's
Aix_Sponsa, and jdkerr's untwinked guardian
Bob.
The "hit power" crafted item procedures always produce an item with a chance to cast level 4 Frost Nova when struck. In hell difficulty, this hit-power "proc" effect chills enemies for almost 3 seconds, which can make a big difference to a hero that needs to temporarily walk away and recover from a hard-hitting enemy.
Dec 2022 Update: Frost Nova was one of the key skills for the very defensive
Elsa by
CaseyJones and of the rainbow warrior
Indigo by
Pb_pal. -- The
2.4 patch for D2R noticeably strengthened Frost Nova's cold damage.
Blizzard
Just a few months ago,
TestyFish shared an illuminating and carefully animated
comparative analysis between Blizzard and Frozen Orb. That post does a much better job than I can to explain the mechanics of these skills.
Blizzard pulls hailstorms down from the sky into a square area approximately eight-by-eight terrain tiles wide. Blizzard's icy stones and shards fall one-at-a-time, once every four animation frames, until 28 shards have struck - the ice storm lasts just over four seconds. Each shard is large enough to hit enemies up to one terrain tile away from where it lands, so it can be even more effective against tightly packed mobs. Blizzard costs 23 mana at skill level 1, and one more mana per skill level thereafter - 42 mana at level 20, 52 at level 30. Each ice shard chills for 4 seconds, and causes cold damage: 45-75 at skill level one, and higher skill levels get increasingly higher returns on damage - 570-619 at level 20, 1120-1179 at level 30. Three synergy skills, Ice Bolt, Ice Blast, and Glacial Spike, each add 5% damage per invested point, so spending all 60 synergy points quadruples Blizzard's cold damage. After Blizzard is cast, no other delay-timered skill (including Blizzard) can be cast until a 1.8 second timeout expires.
More than seventy of our Blizzard maxers were single-element (cold-only) specialists that put as many leftover points as they could into Cold Mastery, synergies, or some combination. Blizzard is definitely the skill of choice for cold-only sorceresses, and that fact seems to me to be a suitable tribute to the game's namesake publisher and distributor. You'll find dozens of great pure Blizzard sorceresses to read about in the
compilation, but I'll just highlight two of them here. Both were untwinked hardcore heroines that were also their players' first ever guardians:
Xendaria by Drixx and
Vlana by Unrsrvd.
We have a wide variety of alternate elemental attacks that our Blizzard sorceresses chose as companion skills. Fireball is the most popular fire alternative; good "blizzball" examples are
Felicia by Milb,
Flogging_Molly and
Donatella by HP_Sauce,
Juliana by Caralis, and
asdf_DemonFrost by asdfgah. Other fire skills combined with Blizzard were Firewall (
Snowy_Ploppy by DX-Crawler,
Sway by
b1ur nee srrw, and
CharleneMcGee by crawlingdeadman) and Hydra (untwinked
MoonlightFlower by Elfie).
Players consistently raved about their choice of Nova as a lightning attack to accompany Blizzard: BobTheWarrior's
Bobtheblizznova, Kimppi's
SparklingIce,
maareek's
Blova, Obdob's
Emeralda, and 99ers
Blower by inter and
Eleanor by
Pb_pal. Other lightning attacks used with Blizzard were Charged Bolt (
Chill_Out by
Darkoooo and
Seeker by
TheNix) and Lightning or Chain Lightning (
Shermila by Asmodeous,
Diablo_Runner by chrischar,
marge by nubikoen,
Sparkles by xxnothing, and
Mhysteria by
Pijus).
Blizzard is aptly represented among a few "archmages" that invest in all three elemental damage types, such as
Albatross' updated enchantress
Stardust, Toppo's weather manipulator
Caillech, and Kdawg's tri-elemental
Okashyra.
Update: 2005 matriarch
CoolTrix, by SeDnA, was relinked in the compilation.
Frozen Orb
This very popular skill may be used both as a single-target missile, when carefully ranged and aimed, but may also be used as a wide area-of-effect chaotic cold bolts when cast reactively or whimsically.
A Frozen Orb travels to a point about nine yards (28 terrain tiles) away from the sorceress, taking a little more than one second to get there. For its 28-animation-frame journey, the orb spins out one ice bolt in a new direction. When the orb reaches its destination, it bursts into sixteen more ice bolts that spray all at once in every direction. At skill level one, casting Frozen Orb costs 25 mana, and each ice bolt inflicts 40-45 cold damage and chills for eight seconds. Each higher level adds 0.5 mana cost, one second chill duration, and increasing damage returns: 122-131 cold damage (29 mana, 16 second chill) at skill level nine; 220-233 (33 mana, 24 second chill) at level 17; 304-320 (36 mana, 30 second chill) at level 23. Its only synergy skill is Ice Bolt, adding 2% damage per skill point invested; maxing the synergy adds 40% to the damage of each of Frozen Orb's cold bolts. Skilled Frozen Orb casters attempt to walk or run to the right position, and then aim the orb so that it releases its final sixteen bolts all at once from within a monster. Depending on the monster's size, it's possible for most or all of those final cold missiles to collide with and damage the monster. For example, if all sixteen bolts of a fully synergized level 23 Frozen Orb erupt under a boss monster, that adds up to over 6800-7168 cold damage
per cast. (Cold Mastery makes that damage hurt even harder.) A player needs luck, finesse, and careful practice to consistently pull off that feat with a sorceress, but most don't find it difficult to learn.
There is a one-second timeout enforced after each Frozen Orb cast.
There aren't very many single-tree-focused cold sorceresses that chose to fully synergize Frozen Orb. Three of them were Glacial Spikers:
Hayate by NagisaFurukawa,
Spike by
maareek, and
LuckyLucyII by sirpoopsalot.
Denali by sevenOfDiamonds had a unique twist: she spent 100 skill points to fully synergized both Orb
and Blizzard, but ignored Cold Mastery altogether.
More than 65 entries in the compilation are dual-element "meteorb" builds, that is, Meteor and Frozen Orb specialists. Almost all of them cast Fireball between Meteor or Frozen Orb spell timeouts. I recommend reading about these three untwinked meteorbers: Cygnus'
Cassandra, LD50's
Khafai, and Mursilis'
Malice. Please look for plenty of other fine meteorbers,
they aren't hard to find.
Socialism helped to popularize an "
orbitall" build that combines Frozen Orb with Firebolt-synergized Fireballs. Some examples:
Lily by janooo,
TheMadGeniusII by Eoanthropus, and squidder's first ever guardian
Sue. The orb-it-aller guide also recommends a higher investment in Teleport, to help conserve mana for the attack spells while magic-finding;
Seleia by GoldenredDragon accepted this advice. Other FO/FB projects: San's
LogicalNoodle,
ioupain's
Selene_I, Cattleya's
Anala,
maareek's
Ineedrunes_II, and Crazy Runner Guy's
Layla-II.
My-SweetFlame by Slartibartfast chose to further synergize her Fireballs with ten skill points Meteor. She used both orbitall and meteorb playstyles.
Many fire/cold sorceress players, particularly hardcore players, selected Hydra as their Frozen Orb companion skill. These include
Bruja by
D2DC,
Alyx_Vance by HP_Sauce,
Habacalva by
Kitteh,
Firaga by Milb, Online's
Grape, and
Charmer by Shagsbeard.
Neksja's
Mona coupled Frozen Orb and Firewall. I found three Frozen Orb/Enchant builds: Grape's
Necronomica, D2DC's
Angelic, and drmalawi's
Life. We also have three proud Frozen Orb/Blaze runners:
Joan by galtwish,
Nur by
Miron, and
Robin by HappeningKT.
The most common lightning/cold builds combined Frozen Orb and Nova: Aconite's
Storm, DementiaMaster's
Diamanda, Flayed One's
Lena, Gahzban's
FroNo, luskan's
StormSpirit, maareek's
Frova, martinkingss'
Finderess,
PhineasB's
Esfera, sirpoopsalot's
Sura, Nightfish's
Alustriel, and
Pyrotechnician's
Frozen_Sparks.
There were also Charged Bolt and Frozen Orb pairings
Lyrella by Kitteh,
JungleJulia by crawlingdeadman,
Holysinner by Eliza, and
Electric_Six by crazymatt1, and a few more that accompanied FO with either Lightning or Chain Lightning: bodis'
LightOrber, HolyPade's
TeslaSorc, Sir Lister of Smeg's
Coldlight,
SirName's
Alice, zaphodbrx's
Nynaeve, PhineasB's
Josie, and Solar's
Swizel.
Enersense presented a full sept of (
1 2 3 4 5 6 7) seven Frozen Orb archmage sorceresses, each having different combinations of fire and lightning skills. LadyMagic by DeathMaster and Aaliyah by jiansonz are both impressive guardian archmage reads. I thought the classic hardcore queen Ceto by purplelocust was a rather unique entry. Here are a few more cool Frozen Orb archmages:
Isoce by Colorless Green,
Becca by Helix,
Zann Esu Warrior by JoeBruce,
ESSoul by Neksja, 1.09-patch matriarch
Gieb_Vex by RobbyD, and 1.07-patch achievements
UltimateBadness and
OhSevenOrbs by HoosierDaddy.
[Update: new histograms]
[2022 Dec Update: new histograms, D2R note]