Skyforge Cryomancer PvE Area Damage Guide

Skyforge Cryomancer PvE Area Damage Guide by Naolas

Introduction

In this guide, I’m going to focus mainly on the solo PvE experience, here the Cryomancer shines because of its robustness and strong control and area damage skills. In Group and PvP, you will probably want to play a different class anyways.

One of the Cryomancer’s staples is Whiteout, the blizzard that lasts for a long time and does significant area damage. It can be used to clear large groups, the larger the groups the better, obviously. Ideally, we want all the enemies between two bosses to just group up and hang out in our Whiteout until they die. In several dungeons, this is actually possible. A Cryomancer can just dash through multiple packs, drop a Whiteout before the boss, kill everything, and survive. In this guide, I am going to describe the build, necessary skills, and crucial strategies for this to work.

Abilities

Icy Comet — Use sparingly, it is expensive without the talent.
Crystal Shield — Makes us almost immune and has a fairly short cooldown. Also roots enemies in place (Icebound effect), which causes them to take 15% extra damage (from the talent).
Cryotrap — Great crowd control tool that pulls everything together, ready to be killed by our area damage. You probably never want to explode it.
Jagged Ice — We need something to kill bosses, this is one of the tools.
Whiteout — The big area damage skills. Fairly long cooldown, which is why we need to make it count when we use it.

Talents

Blizzard — Makes our spammable area damage ability stronger.
Supercooling — Enemies frequently have the Icebound effect (from Slide or Crystal shield).
Exhaustion — Quicker boss kills or to kill more beefy enemies that survived the Whiteout.
Slide — Great distance for our dashes and crowd control for anything that follows.
Frost Bite — Longer Whiteout with additional crowd control? Yes, please!
Shivers — Crystal shield now absorbs 80% of all damage and roots enemies in place when they get near.
Frost Rage — Increases our single target damage, which is a bit lacking as a Cryo.
Cold Veil — Crystal Shield cooldown is 19s now.

Gear

Main hand — “Cryobeam and Icy Missile at both charge levels inflict 36% more damage.” More damage for our single target dot.
Off hand — “Whiteout inflicts 112% more damage.”
Amulets — Jagged Ice extra damage. We’re a bit weak on single target damage, so let us improve that.
Rings — Str/Luck, Accuracy > Crit Chance. Standard damage dealer stats.

Provinces

Crushing blow > Accuracy > Critical chance > Discharge Recovery > Solidity (standard DD chapels)

Symbols (loosely in order of importance/time to unlock them)

Ultimate Strength — Each level essentially increases accuracy by 10%.
Maximum Recoil — Increases critical damage.
Impulse Intensity — Increases impulse damage.
Lacerated Wound — Critical damage applies damage over time effect. All damage ticks (even Icy Dart and Slide) can trigger this.
Mark of Death
Warlock — The dot is pretty much constantly on enemies, because it is triggered by Slide and Icy Dart, which do small but frequent damage.
Other DD class symbols (Alchemist, Archer, Kinetic, Berserker)

Trash Strategy

1. Run/dash through as many groups as possible (this take a bit of trial and error). Make sure to keep one dash for the area damage setup.
2. Stop in the middle of the final group. You might need to pop Crystal Shield a couple seconds before if you’re getting beaten up too much.
3. Make sure enemies are close enough. If there are just a few and the bulk is still running, you can pop Crystal Shield and wait a second or two.
4. Drop Cryotrap, then Whiteout, then dash forward.
5. Keep running a bit until you are maximum distance for your Freezing Gale (hold down left button) and start spamming it. You can throw in a Icy Comet once you have enough resources for it, or put some Icy Darts on strong targets.
6. Once Whiteout runs out, most things should be dead, leaving many health orbs on the ground. You can use these to help you kill the remaining low hp enemies.

Boss Strategy

Use Icy Dart when Impulse Charge is up.
Try to use Jagged Ice whenever it is up. Popping Crystal Shield right before Jagged Ice allows you to just tank through mechanics and keep channeling.
Use Whiteout for add spawns or for burst. On bosses that have neither of these requirements, just use it on cooldown.
Typical starter: Icy Dart -> Whiteout -> Crystal Shield -> Jagged Ice

That is pretty much it. I wanted to keep it short and to the point.