Playstyle 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
What spells we cast depend entirely on what cooldowns we have available and if we’re inside our Winter's Embrace window or not. You want to essentially use cooldowns on cooldown, ensuring you’re not overcapping Winter’s Orbs in any way. I’ll highlight below the Single Target rotation as well as the AoE rotation below.
Single Target Rotations
Winter's Embrace Single Target Window:
- Flight Of The Navir
- Bursting Ice
- Freezing Torrent OR Glacial Blast
- Cold Snap
General Single Target Priority:
- Ice Blitz
- Winter's Blessing
- Flight Of The Navir
- Bursting Ice
- Glacial Blast if enough orbs OR Freezing Torrent
- Cold Snap
- Frost Bolt
AoE Rotations
Winter's Embrace AoE Window:
- Freezing Torrent
- Bursting Ice
- Ice Comet
- Ice Comet
General AoE Priority:
- Ice Blitz
- Winter's Blessing
- Flight Of The Navir
- Freezing Torrent
- Bursting Ice
- Ice Comet
- Cold Snap
- Frost Bolt
The goal on AoE is to pool as many Orbs as you can in-between Winter's Embrace windows so that you’re able to Ice Comet twice back to back with the 20% damage increase.
Early on you might lack the ability to generate enough orbs in-between these windows, in which case I’d use a Cold Snap instead of a second Ice Comet.
Rime's Ultimate Ability
Your Ultimate: Wrath Of Winter, doesn’t change how you play, it just enables you to do far more with what you have.
Just try to avoid overcapping Orbs outside of Winter's Embrace windows and make sure to dump all your orbs before it’s over. Be liberal with your spenders inside this cooldown.
Utility and Defensives
Outside of your damaging abilities you have a few useful utility and defensive abilities.
Frost Ward, which is a massive 40% damage reduction personal for 4 seconds on a 30 second cooldown. It’s incredibly powerful, use it often.
You also have Frigid Winds which is an AoE frontal knockback that slows enemies hit by 50% for 12 seconds. Using this to interrupt dangerous mobs or help your Tank kite is extremely valuable.
And lastly you have Winter's Blessing. This is mostly used in combination with your damage cooldowns as you benefit far more from the 20% increased spirit and dealing more damage makes this heal your allies more. It’s a nice tool to help your healer in a pinch if it lines up with your damage.