Frozen Orb

Creates a magical globe that sprays a torrent of ice bolts to lay waste to your enemies.

Frozen Orb is the last Sorceress Cold attack (level 30, requires Blizzard). It is an orb that flies through monsters, throwing ice bolts in every direction as it goes, and bursts into a ring of bolts at the end of its flight. Two numbers decide it: the damage of one bolt, 262–276 at level 20, and the count of bolts, which the Basin's page puts at up to 46 from one cast. The skill has one synergy, worth 2% a hard point.

The numbers

The damage is per bolt. It comes from EMin 80 and EMax 90 with HitShift 7, which halves them: 40–45 at level 1. The minimum then grows +10 a level to level 8, +12 to 16, +14 to 22, +14.5 to 28 and +15 a level past that; the maximum grows +10.5, +12.5, +14.5, +15 and +15.5 over the same brackets. That is 134–143 at level 10, 262–276 at level 20 and 407–426 at level 30. The line reads lvl, so +skills count.

The cold length is ELen 200 frames plus 25 a level (ELevLen1–3 are all 25), at 25 frames a second: 8 seconds at level 1 and 1 second more a level, 17 at level 10, 27 at level 20, 37 at level 30, on every bolt. It also reads lvl.

Mana is 25 at level 1 and 0.5 more a level (mana 50, lvlmana 1, manashift 7): 29.5 at level 10, 34.5 at level 20, 39.5 at level 30. The casting delay never changes and is left out of the table: localdelay 25 frames, 1 second.

How it works

Frozen Orb fires one "frozenorb" missile at the target; the Basin's page classes it as a medium-range piercing missile that generates multiple long-range missiles. The orb itself does no damage and applies no chill: it pierces the target and anything in its path, and in each frame of its 30-frame flight it fires a bolt, unless it hits an obstacle. Each bolt is size 1 and is destroyed on collision, so a bolt hits one target. When the orb expires it releases a nova of 16 bolts that also damage and chill; if it expires while passing through a monster, that monster is hit by several of them, by the Basin's picture up to all 16 on a size-3 target standing on the right sub-tile (12 on a size-2 target), and 11 or fewer otherwise. The orb travels about 9.33 yards before expiring. The Basin warns that the orb also releases a 16-bolt nova on hitting an enemy or obstacle, and that those bolts apply no damage or cold length.

Each bolt is cold damage, reduced by the target's cold resistance, see Dealing Elemental Damage and Resistances and Immunities; there is no attack roll. Every bolt that lands chills for the cold length, divided by the difficulty's cold divisor in Nightmare and Hell, see Chill and Freeze. The casting delay is 25 frames, local in D2R by the Basin's page, and a cast is the delay plus the action frame, 25 + 4 to 7 frames depending on Faster Cast Rate.

The tooltip's number is one bolt. The 30 flight bolts spray in all directions and the 16-bolt nova lands where the orb ends, so the damage a single monster takes depends on where it stands, not on the level alone.

Synergies and +skills

• Ice Bolt: +2% cold damage per level (skills.txt Param8 = 2; the calc reads blvl, hard points only). It is the only synergy.
• Frozen Orb in turn feeds Ice Bolt (+15% a hard point), Frost Nova (+10%), Ice Blast (+8%) and Glacial Spike (+5%).
• +skills raise the bolt damage and the cold length (lvl); the synergy, the delay and the bolt count do not move with +skills.
• Cold Mastery lowers the target's cold resistance and so raises what every bolt lands.

Against players

A player's hit on another player is cut to 17% of its value (difficultylevels.txt PlayerDamagePercentVSPlayer) before anything else, see Player versus Player. The Basin's page gives no other rule for Frozen Orb against players.

Build notes

• With one synergy at 2%, 20 hard points in Ice Bolt are +40%; the usual spend after Frozen Orb is Cold Mastery, which lowers resistance instead, and the Ice Bolt points are cheap at 3 mana a cast.
• The damage scales with +skills alone: level 30 is 407–426 a bolt, 55% more than level 20, so +skills gear does most of the work.
• The 1-second delay caps the casts: by the Basin's count 29 to 32 frames a cast, so Faster Cast Rate saves at most 3 frames an orb.