Talents
Starting this season there a lot of changes in Rime's talents. The most important ones are that two talents from Early Access Season 2 (Burst bolter and Winter's Embrace) have been made baseline:
- Winter's Embrace has been added to Rime’s Bursting Ice baseline.
- Frost Bolt now generates 3 Anima baseline.
This helps a tremendous amount with early game anima generation and frees up 3 talent points to be allocated elsewhere in the early game.
Rime has one particular mechanic that is crucial to play around. Bursting Ice's effect of Winter's Embrace. Your gameplay revolves around this talent and maximizing your Winter Orbs spent in this window.
Rime has a lot of viable talent builds. Any of the builds listed can get you very far in the game. Playing the build that you enjoy rather than what is perceived as the best is better in almost every circumstance.
Having said that the start build for league progression will be the beam build.
Beam Build
This build focuses on the strongest talents with immediate impact and does not factor in your Legendary. It's the easiest to play and still competitive damage-wise compared to the Bursting Ice build. It can be your default build at all stages of the game and only becomes stronger with Legendaries, particularly Drakesblood Tapestry, but it can be played with any of the three.
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We start off with talents that increase our AoE output, since AoE is what we'll spend the majority of our dungeon time on early on. As we progress to higher difficulties, single Target becomes more important. Icy Flow, Greater Glacial Blast, and Biting Cold are intended for this purpose.
Avalanche and Coalescing Frost are consistently great AoE options that perform well for their purpose.
Burstbolter and Supreme Torrent help boost your Anima generation. The Bursting Ice pulse generated from the frostbolt generates 1 additional Anima.
Icy Flow, Biting Cold, and Greater Glacial Blast increase your Single Target damage to help kill bosses in three-boss dungeons.
Soulfrost Torrent is a consistent talent that affects both Single Target and AoE in combination with Coalescing Frost.
Bursting Talons
Skandi's Bands Of Endless Winter is mandatory for this build.
This build sacrifices Area of effect damage for more Single target. Bosses in season 3 take a long time so this an alternative to the beam build that kill bosses slightly faster.
With the introduction of Icy Talons and Harrowing Ice, a Bursting Ice build is now possible. It focuses more on the builder-spender playstyle, using Freezing Torrent as a builder and cooldown reduction tool via Chilling Finesse rather than a large DPS button.
If you don't like the Chilling Finesse playstyle it is also possible to progress with the Beam build.
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Early on we index our strength into AoE with Harrowing Ice and Burstbolter. Once we have Icy Talons and Greater Glacial Blast it will be a big increase in ST damage on bosses. The secondary benefit of Icy Talons is that we'll have a lot more time in our rotation to generate Anima instead of spending it. This helps with our Ice Blitz uptime, as Anima generated means Frost Swallows.
Late game, through gearing our character, we most likely won't need Wisdom Of The North for Ice Blitz uptime, so we can switch to Glacial Assault. Increasing our priority damage on important mobs while still doing AoE damage.
A BIS setup with Skandi's Bands Of Endless Winter
The following is what I'd suggest for the Bursting Talons build.
Weapon
You can use Asha's Chronoshift Spire or Frozen Staff Of An'zhyr or Void-Touched Conduit
Stat Allocation
| Stat | Amount |
| Crit | 200 |
| Exp | Remaining |
| Haste | 150 |
| Spirit | 130 |
Item Modifier Set-up
There are two floater points that are in The Wayfarer but they could be swapped to The Vehement or Vengeful Soul or Stats.
Gem Set-up
Suggested gem set-up for the Bursting Talons build:
Seal of the Heskyr (+25% Bonus)
Eldrin Signet
This is the end game build for Eldrin Signet Of Undulating Spirits. It is very similar to the Bursting talons build with some minor changes.
You want to cast as many Winter's Blessing as possible so Burstbolter is switched over to Wisdom Of The North. Wisdom Of The North also helps in reducing the cooldown of Navir's Keeper helping orb generation and stacks towards Glacial Assault.
Because we don't use Skandi's Bands Of Endless Winter the value of busting ice has dropped. It is mainly used for the 20% damage increase for your 5 orb Icy Talons spenders
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A BIS setup with Eldrin Signet Of Undulating Spirits
The following is what I'd suggest for the Ring build.
Weapon
Go with Asha's Chronoshift Spire.
Stat Allocation
| Stat | Amount |
| Crit | 200 |
| Exp | Remaining |
| Haste | 150 |
| Spirit | 130 |
Item Modifier Set-up
Suggested item modifier set-up for the Ring build:
Gem Set-up
Suggested gem set-up for the Ring build:
Seal of the Heskyr (+25% Bonus)
Cloak Beam
This is the end game build for Drakesblood Tapestry, heavily inspired by the Rime player neteX.
The strengths of this build are very strong area of effect thanks to the interaction between Drakesblood Tapestry, The Vehement, The Vainglorious.
The damage of Cold Snap + The Vainglorious gets empowered by stacks of Drakesblood Tapestry. This empowered Cold Snap then gets echoed in area of effect onto multiple targets because of vehement. Crit is very important in this build as the echoed damage scales off crit and The Vehement blessing has extra crit scaling. In essence double dipping on crit.
A big weakness of this build is in its Single target damage.
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A BIS setup with Drakesblood Tapestry
The following is what I'd suggest for the Cloak build.
Weapon
Run Frozen Staff Of An'zhyr or Void-Touched Conduit
Stat Allocation
| Stat | Amount |
| Crit | 200+ |
| Exp | 100 |
| Haste | 150 |
| Spirit | 120 |
Item Modifier Set-up
Suggested item modifier set-up for the Cloak build:
Gem Set-up
Suggested gem set-up for the Cloak build. Note that you can run 6 Blue or Red instead of Yellow if you want.
Seal of the Heskyr (+25% Bonus)