Rift Wizard Frostfire build

Why Frostfire

Fire & ice are complementary elements in rift wizard, as enemies that are immune to ice are often weak to fire and vice versa. Steam anima lets you get amazing mana potion economy & action economy by summoning strong minions by just using your cantrips & freeze. The build is strong enough to beat challenge modes like wizard warlords & giantslayer, with skillful enough piloting.

Early Game

I recommend starting with death bolt just because it has the best matchup against realm 1 & 2, after which we get icicle & fireball. Getting 3 cantrips (level 1 spells) early lets us worry less about mana potions & early circles, so choose a realm 2 with a ruby heart if one is available. If you see an early nature or conjuration circle, you can get get earthen sentinel at a discount before going for steam anima. Alternatively you can rush steam anima + freeze if you get dragon horns or bags of spikes, or if you manage to clear the first few realms with just cantrips. Ideally we want to reach an ice circle when we have 6 sp saved up, to buy steam anima & freeze for a 2 sp discount (fire or enchantment circle will do if no ice circle), but as this is our main combo we don't want to delay it - unupgraded cantrips & a pet rock will only get us so far.

By realm 10 your frostfire build should have at least:

Icicle, fireball, earthen sentinel, freeze, steam anima, radiant chill.

Options for leftover SP: arch sorcerer, permanence, ice ball, searing orb / searing heat, flame burst, boiling blood.

Ice ball to counter early mass fire immunes, searing orb if you want to trivialize open realms (or searing heat if you're planning on using cantrip cascade later). Boiling blood if you need to ramp up steam anima damage for any reason, for a very low sp cost.

Why Earthen Sentinel?

It serves as a strong early game spell that bridges the gap between the cantrips & your main combo. It serves as a bodyguard summon that can deal respectable physical damage & survive several turns in late game while drawing fire away from you, and it doesn't require any upgrades to do so. Additionally, you can freeze your own earthen sentinel & unfreeze it. I call this the sauna rock, as you heat up the sauna & throw some water on the rocks to get steam. Also works as a target for ice vortex.

Gameplay Advice

So the main combo is, as you might have guessed, to freeze a unit and then have it unfrozen by fire damage. If no enemies in a realm are fire or ice immune, you can get away with only casting a handful of fireballs, as the steam elementals you summon will do the unfreezing for you, this is why radiant chill takes priority over searing heat. As we're mostly relying on our steam anima to kill things (at least early on), we can't make use of starfire or fiery judgement to get around fire immunity (steam elementals won't target fire immune enemies). This means we have to always play a bit reactively to what we're up against - sometimes you just have to get iceball to clear that realm with fire slimes, flame burst / ice vortex vs mass iron enemies, or prince of ruin to get those bone shamblers under control.

Build Variants & Late Game Scaling

Around realm 10~ you should choose how to scale for late game, and there's a few ways to do this with a frostfire start.

The arcane variant of frostfire makes use of arch sorcerer & void lord to turn cantrip cascade & ice vortex into screen clearing nukes with great damage type coverage. Additionally it gives you greater mobility via a long ranged blink with many charges.

So in addition to the early game base build, for this variant we want to end up on at least:

void lord, blink, ice vortex with radius upgrade, cantrip cascade with range upgrade, searing heat.

Optional: ice tap, voidflame lantern, storm caller, shatter shards, prince of ruin.

Pure frostfire mainly likes to grab ice lord to empower damage dealing ice skills on top of arch sorcerer to boost both your ice & fire sorceries, which is usually strong enough to keep flame burst / volcanic eruption relevant due to their high base damage.

In addition to the early game base build this variant usually ends up on:

Ice lord, iceball with increased radius / chill wind, flame burst / volcanic eruption, storm caller.

Optional: fire lord, melting armor, prince of ruin, frostbite if going chill wind so you can snipe spawners from anywhere, otherwise shatter shards is better.

A frostfire enchanter takes arch enchanter to get more value from blizzard, boiling blood & other

enchantments. You can even grab seal fate and play this variant like 'pet rock stall', as I call it - hiding behind your earthen sentinels pumping out steam anima for self defense, while upgraded seal fate snipes all the spawners from afar.

The enchanter variant ends on:

Arch enchanter, blizzard, boiling blood, searing seal for open maps

Optional: seal fate, purity, pain mirror, holy armor, basically any useful enchantments that you need at the moment. My arch enchanter builds usually end with about 10-15 spells, trading damage for utility.

Lastly, I guess you could just pivot into a fire sorcery build after using steam anima for early game, and using fire's strong damage conversion skills in starfire & fiery judgement to scale damage & ignore immunities in late game.

Builds in rift wizard aren't that strict, there's always room for improvisation, and you might want to deviate from the plan to deal with the next realm. Around realm 20 you could consider learning one of the word spells to greatly increase your odds of winning. Word of beauty if you're low on healing, word of ice if you want more freeze triggers (cantrip cascade variant usually doesn't need help with this), word of chaos if you like winning.

Combos & Nonbos

Frostfire shrine + icicle / ice ball / blizzard lets you 1-turn steam anima, for the cost of not being able to use these for defensive freezes.

Freezing shrine increases the aoe of icicle freezing, also gives you access to consistent blizzard freeze or (meme option) frostfire hydra steam anima.

Disintegration shrine on ice vortex wins games.

Stormcaller or blizzard & searing orb - your orb's just going to die to blizzard clouds, use searing heat

for LoS unfreezing instead if you're spawning clouds.

Storm cloud shrine + blizzard - will make your steam anima die to the clouds from lightning damage.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2842146038

Frostfire build