Playstyle & Rotation Rime Fellowship Hero Guide

Overview

Rime is a ranged spellcaster who utilizes powerful spender abilities to deal massive burst damage. The goal is to prep her burst windows by building Winter’s Orbs and then deal as much damage as possible with your spenders inside of Winter's Embrace windows. When played well, she deals huge AoE damage and extremely strong single target.

Winter's Orbs

Winter Orbs are Rimes unique builder/spender mechanic. You use this resource to cast powerful spells. You can have a maximum of 5 Winter’s Orbs, and it’s extremely important to avoid overcapping this.

Rime generates Winter’s Orbs that are consumed whenever you cast Glacial Blast in Single Target, or Ice Comet for multiple targets. The more orbs you generate, the more damage you can do.

You generate Winter’s Orbs with your main filler ability: Frost Bolt, as well as Cold Snap, Freezing Torrent and Bursting Ice. Since you want to ideally save Bursting Ice to activate your burst windows, your main generators end up being Frost Bolt and Cold Snap.

There are multiple talents that aid the generation of these Winter’s Orbs, and it’s very important to keep an eye on this.

Winter’s Embrace

Since our entire playstyle revolves around the talent: Winter's Embrace, it’s important to understand exactly how this works and how to maximize the effectiveness of it.

While Bursting Ice is active on an enemy, you gain Winter's Embrace, causing you to deal 20% more damage for 3 seconds.

This damage increase comes into effect the instant your Bursting Ice cast finishes and is what we want to play around to maximize our damage. It doesn’t sound like a very long time but you can fit everything you want into this time frame with not a lot of practice.

Rotation & Priorities

Rime's rotation is relatively simple - however, there are some changes to your priority list of spells to cast depending on what Legendary you choose and what Talent build you play with. These are covered below.

Basic Priority Rotation

Below is a basic priority list of spells for both Single Target and AoE that I want you to think of as your foundational priorities.

AoE:

1. 1x or 2x Cold Snap on gather before stacked.
2. Winter's Blessing / Flight Of The Navir / Ice Blitz
3. Freezing Torrent
4. Bursting Ice
5. Cold Snap
6. Ice Comet
7. Frost Bolt

Single Target:

1. Winter's Blessing / Flight Of The Navir / Ice Blitz
2. Bursting Ice
3. Freezing Torrent (if no Winter's Orbs)
4. Glacial Blast
5. Cold Snap
6. Frost Bolt

As you can see the main differences here are the sequences of when you cast Bursting Ice and what follows.

Beam Build Priority Rotation

Beam Build with Drakesblood Tapestry plays very straightforward, and will be the Legendary build I suggest to most Rime players. As you will see it really doesn't change the basic priority list of spells for Rime at all.

AoE:

1. Winter's Blessing / Flight Of The Navir / Ice Blitz
2. Freezing Torrent
3. Bursting Ice
4. Cold Snap
5. Ice Comet
6. Frost Bolt

Single Target:

1. Winter's Blessing / Flight Of The Navir / Ice Blitz
2. Bursting Ice
3. Freezing Torrent
4. Cold Snap
5. Glacial Blast
6. Frost Bolt

The main difference here is you ALWAYS hold Bursting Ice and ALWAYS cast Freezing Torrent in your Winter's Embrace window. Glacial Blast becomes a filler spell.

Cascading Blitz Priority Rotation

If you decide to go the way of Skandi's Sabatons Of Endless Winter, there are more distinct changes than the previous build priorities.

This build revolves around Chilling Finesse and Wisdom Of The North for a few things:

1. Maximize Ice Blitz uptime via Cascading Blitz.
2. Maximize Anima Gain via CDR on Freezing Torrent and Bursting Ice from Chilling Finesse.
3. Spend Orbs in your increased Winter's Blessing window timeframe to reduce Ice Blitz / Flight Of The Navir / Winter's Blessing cooldowns via Wisdom Of The North.

That being said, the AoE and Single Target rotation are far more similar with this build.

AoE & Single Target Priority Rotation

1. Winter's Blessing / Flight Of The Navir / Ice Blitz
2. Bursting Ice
3. Freezing Torrent
4. Cold Snap
5. Ice Comet (AoE) / Glacial Blast (Single Target)
6. Frost Bolt

One caveat here and the main difference to the standard / beam build priority lists is that you cast Bursting Ice / Freezing Torrent off cooldown. This is to make sure that you are generating peak Anima, thus (due to Cascading Blitz) sending more swallows to attack your target and by result extend your Ice Blitz. The only time I would say you do NOT cast Bursting Ice off cooldown is if Freezing Torrent will shortly be back up, as to not miss out on maximizing Chilling Finesse value.

Flight Of The Navir also becomes a far more important CD. This ability makes your Cold Snap and Freezing Torrent send additional Frost Swallows to attack your target, resulting in even more Ice Blitz duration extension. This is the main ability that enables you to retain Ice Blitz between packs on Trash.

Void-Touched Conduit & You

Since our BiS weapon, Void-Touched Conduit, regularly reaches upwards of 20% of our overall damage breakdown, I find it important to teach you how to master this weapon.

The goal of this weapon is to apply the debuff (ideally to a priority target) and deal as much damage as you can in a 15 second window to max out the damage stored in the debuff. The way you go about this in AoE is very simple, but in Single Target without Spirit Ult it becomes more tricky.

Tips

1. Intellect is snapped on cast of your weapon to increase potential amount of damage you can store. The formula is Intellect x 85.
2. Damage modifiers (Ice Blitz, Wrath Of Winter, Winter's Embrace) must be active upon detonation or duration lapse of the debuff. In other words you do NOT snap Damage Modifiers upon cast of the weapon - they MUST be active when it pops.

AoE Weapon Rotation (Beam Build)

1. Winter's Blessing / Flight Of The Navir / Ice Blitz / Voidbringer's Touch
2. Freezing Torrent
3. Bursting Ice
4. Cold Snap
5. Ice Comet

This simple rotation, with Beam Build and Drakesblood Tapestry, will pop your weapon on the very first Winter's Embrace window of an AoE pull.

AoE Weapon Rotation (Cascading Build)

1. Winter's Blessing / Flight Of The Navir / Ice Blitz / Voidbringer's Touch
2. Bursting Ice
3. Freezing Torrent
4. Cold Snap
5. Ice Comet

This similarly simple rotation, with Cascading Blitz Build and Skandi's Sabatons Of Endless Winter will pop your weapon on the very first Winter's Embrace window of an AoE pull.

Single Target Weapon Rotation (Both Builds)

1. Winter's Blessing / Flight Of The Navir / Ice Blitz
2. Glacial Blast (if its prepull and you don't have 2 orbs saved skip this)
3. Voidbringer's Touch
4. Bursting Ice
5. Freezing Torrent
6. Cold Snap
7. Glacial Blast
8. Frost Bolt
9. REAPPLY Bursting Ice at end of duration of your Voidbringer's Touch debuff if you did not pop it early!

This rotation is also simple, the reason you send a Glacial Blast before pressing weapon is because the projectile speed of the weapon is faster than Glacial Blast. In other words, you fit an extra Glacial Blast into your Void-Touched Conduit window.

IF you have Wrath Of Winter available, it is advised you do NOT open with Bursting Ice at all and actually send Freezing Torrent if not orb capped and Glacial Blast and THEN you apply Bursting Ice later with the goal to pop your conduit while Winter's Embrace is active. There is no real set rotation for this, just give it a whirl yourself and feel out the timing - there is variance with how many Glacial Blast crits you do or do not get in your weapon window.

Let's start with a couple of helpful tips for Rime:

• Always be casting. The difference between a Rime who is always actively casting and using his abilities effectively is big.
• Keep an eye out for set bonuses, these are typically pretty powerful and will greatly aid your damage out-put if you’re able to obtain a set, just don’t spend time farming them early on as ilvl will be more important.

Interface Options

One of the most basic, but important things you can do in Fellowship is mark specific targets or locations. In the input settings you will notice you have the ability to keybind “Mark Unit” and “Mark location”. These can be exceptionally useful for designating targets to kill or important stack points on bosses.

Buffs and Debuffs

Buffs and Debuffs in Fellowship are extremely important, but unfortunately the base UI doesn’t place the display of these in a great location. As a result, I’d recommend moving them closer to the middle of your screen using the “EDIT HUD” feature in the game menu.

Here is my UI import from the Image shown if you just want to pick up and play:

https://fellowship.wago.io/N2iECL64Z

Beware this is made on 1440p resolution so if you play a different resolution this may not port over well.