This guide will teach you the basics of playing Rime in Fellowship. Rime is an Intellect-based DPS hero who excels at ranged frost magic. She builds Anima through her abilities, creating Winter Orbs, and converts both into devastating burst spells. Positioning and resource flow are key — when managed correctly, she deals strong single-target and delivers explosive area of effect damage.
This guide will teach you how to use her abilities, and which talents to choose for the best build. A special shout out to Toonic over on the Fellowship Discord. We’ve had several conversations with him regarding Rime, and while we disagree on some points, we are generally in agreement on the following information.
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Table of Contents
- Rime’s Abilities Guide
- Rime Anima & Winter Orb Guide
- Rime Talent and Build Guide
- Rime Opener and Rotation Guide
- Rime Gearing Guide
- Rime Legendary Guide
- High burst potential with full resources.
- Flexible and simple rotation through priority system.
- Group support with Winter’s Blessing healing.
- Fast resource generation during cooldowns can cause quick overcapping.
- Threat issues in burst if not careful.
- Cloth wearer means noticeably more physical damage taken than some other heroes.
Rime’s Abilities Guide
| Ability/Icon | Name | Cast / Recast | Range / Radius | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
![]() | Frost Bolt | 1.5s | ↔ 30yd | Hurl a bolt of frost magic at target enemy, dealing 234% Intellect damage. Generates 1 Anima |
![]() | Cold Snap | GCD 12.0s (2) | ↔ 30yd | Assault the target with extreme cold, dealing 364.8% Intellect damage. Generates 1 Winter Orb |
![]() | Freezing Torrent | 2s Channel 15.0s | ↔ 30yd | Flay your target with a beam of frost energy, dealing 156.2% Intellect damage every 0.4 seconds for 2 seconds while channeling. Generates 1 Anima per tick |
![]() | Bursting Ice | 2s 10.0s | ↔ 30yd ↻ 5yd | Conjures an icy crystal inside a target that pulses frost damage, dealing 55% Intellect damage every 0.5 seconds for 3 seconds to the target and nearby enemies. Generates 1 Anima each time it pulses |
![]() | Frost Ward | Instant 30.0s | Self | You take 40% reduced damage for 4 seconds. |
![]() | Ice Dash | Instant 25.0s (2) | ↔ 10yd | Quickly travel forward a short distance. Can be used during Global Cooldown. |
![]() | Brain Freeze | Instant 20.0s | ↔ 30yd | Interrupt the target’s spellcasting and prevent it from casting for 4 seconds. Can be used during Global Cooldown. |
![]() | Glacial Blast | 2.0s | ↔ 30yd | Costs 2 Winter Orbs Hurl a mass of ice at target enemy, dealing 1188% Intellect damage. |
![]() | Ice Comet | GCD | ↔ 30yd | Costs 2 Winter Orbs Unleash a large Ice Comet from above target enemy to crash down on them, dealing 451% Intellect damage to all enemies caught in the impact radius. |
![]() | Ice Blitz | Instant 120.0s | Self | You enter a state of focused casting for 20 seconds, causing you to deal 20% more damage for the duration. Can be used during Global Cooldown and while casting. |
![]() | Flight of the Navir | GCD 60.0s | ↔ 30yd | Summon 5 Frost Swallows to circle above target enemy for 20 seconds. Your Cold Snap and Freezing Torrent command the frost swallows to swoop down on enemies, each dealing 68% Intellect damage to their target. |
![]() | Frigid Winds | Instant 60.0s | ↔ 10yd | Blast enemies in front of you with arctic winds, Knocking Back enemies and Slowing them by 50% for 12 sec. Interrupts spells and abilities. |
![]() | Winter’s Blessing | Instant 60.0s | Self | Your Spirit is increased by 20% for 20 seconds and 30% of all damage you deal is replicated as healing divided equally between all allies. |
![]() | Wrath of Winter | 1.0s SPIRIT ABILITY | Self | Invoke the spirits of the frozen tundra for 20 seconds, granting you 1 Winter Orb every 4 seconds. You deal +20% increased damage and your Glacial Blast ability is instant cast while Wrath of Winter is active. Spirit Ability When you activate your Spirit ability you gain Spirit of Heroism, granting +30% haste for 20 seconds. |
Rime Anima and Winter Orbs Mechanic Guide
Rime generates Anima which converts into a Winter Orb at 9 stacks. Winter Orbs are then spent to cast powerful burst spells, Glacial Blast for single target and Ice Comet for Area of Effect (AoE). Winter Orbs cap at 5, so actively manage orb generation and spending to keep your damage up, save for bursts, but also not waste any through over-capping. Generating a Winter Orb will cause a Frost Swallow to attack your target.
The default location of Rime’s Orbs and Anima are shown on the HUD just under the character.

Rime BIS Talents and Build
Rime has several viable choices for talent builds. We are suggesting a Spender build, which focuses on generating and spending as many Winter Orbs as possible while extending Cascading Blitz, propped up by the strong burst windows with Winter’s Embrace. There can be some interchangeability here, but we believe these are the best talents to take for Rime.

| Talent Point Total | Talent Tree (Row + Column) |
|---|---|
| 2 Points | 1b |
| 3 Points | 1b + 2a |
| 4 Points | 1b + 2a + 2b |
| 5 Points | 1b + 2a + 3b |
| 6 Points | 1b + 2a + 3b + 4b |
| 7 Points (Contender) | 1b + 2a + 3b + 3c |
| 8 Points | 1b + 2a + 3b + 3c + 4b |
| 9 Points (Adept) | 1b + 2a + 3b + 4b + 5b |
| 10 Points | 1b + 2a + 3b + 4b + 5b + 6a |
| 11 Points (Champion) | 1b + 2a + 3b + 5a + 5b |
| 12 Points | 1b + 2a + 3b + 5a + 5b + 6a |
| 13 Points (Paragon) | 1a+ 1b + 2a + 4b + 5a + 5b + 6a |
Chilling Finesse (1A) causes each of your Cold Snap’s to reduce the cooldown of Freezing Torrent by 1.5 seconds, and each tick of your Freezing Torrent to reduce the cooldown of Bursting Ice by 0.3 seconds.
Winter’s Embrace (1B) gives a 3 second burst window where all of your damage is increased by 20% for 3 seconds upon casting Bursting Ice, or 5 seconds with Skandi’s Sabatons of Endless Winter. Even without haste, you’ll easily be able to fit two to three of your strongest abilities in each window.
Burstbolter (2A) gives 3x as much Anima on every Frost Bolt cast, and also causes it to do extra area of effect damage through a single pulse of Bursting Ice. Extremely strong talent, and stronger than some multi-point talents for the cost of one.
Icy Flow (3A) causes your Cold Snap to grant you Icy Flow for 8 seconds. This reduces the cast time of Glacial Blast by 0.5 seconds or the impact delay of your next Ice Comet. Both Glacial Blast and Ice Comet gain +25% increased critical strike chance when consuming this buff. If you don’t want to take Tundra Guard at 13 points, or you feel you don’t need the defensive then we recommend dropping Tundra Guard and Biting Cold and taking this.
Avalanche (3B) causes your Ice Comets to have a chance to double and triple cast for free. Ice Comet is a large portion of your damage, especially paired with Winter’s Embrace and Frostweaver’s Wrath. You’ll want to use Ice Comet when fighting 2 or more enemies with Avalanche.
Coalescing Frost (3C) adds an extra burst of AoE damage to Freezing Torrent, additionally aiding in burning trash mobs down. This can be lined up with Winter’s Embrace.
Tundra Guard (4A) is an incredibly potent defensive boost to Rime’s Frost Ward. This talent causes you to heal for 35% of all damage you do, and extends the duration of Frost Ward.
Greater Glacial Blast (4B) is taken when you have 6 points available and will be taken every time you have a free point to use until late game. It will naturally increase your single target damage and more significantly during your Wraith of Winter when Glacial Blast is instant cast.
Cascading Blitz (5A) causes a Frost Swallow to attack your enemy for every Anima you generate. Additionally, Cascading Blitz increases the duration of your Ice Blitz for every Frost Swallow that deals damage. This means additional duration on your 20% damage increase from Ice Blitz.
Frostweaver’s Wrath (5B) gives you a 17% chance to gain Frostweaver’s Wrath for 12 seconds when you generate a Winter Orb. This buff increases the critical strike chance of your next Ice Comet or Glacial Blast by 100%. Since you’ll be generating and spending quite fast with this build, you’ll be getting a lot of value from this.
Biting Cold (6A) increases your critical strike damage by 10%.
Remember to not take talent trees as is and adjust for any legendary or weapon trees you get, or content you are doing.
Alternative Talent Builds
| Beam Build | 1b + 2a + 2b + 3b + 3c + 4a + 5c + 6a |
| Cascading Finesse | 1a + 1b + 2a + 3b + 4a + 5a + 6a + 6c |
Rime Rotation Guide
When playing Rime, you want to ensure you’re taking advantage of your damage windows when you have Winter’s Embrace talented, additionally be sure you’re not overcapping Winter Orbs. This will change slightly in single-target situations versus multiple enemy pulls.
Winter’s Embrace Burst Windows
With the spender build Winter’s Embrace damage windows become much simpler. You simply want to ensure you’re dumping as many Glacial Blasts and Ice Comets within the window, without wasting Bursting Ice casts.
Winter’s Embrace lasts 3 seconds, with an additional 2 while you have Skandi’s Sabatons of Endless Winter equipped. You’ll want to go into each window with enough Winter Orb‘s to cast your spenders without overcapping from the Freezing Torrent and Bursting Ice generation.
Ability Priority
Keep everything on cooldown, ensuring you do not overcap with Cold Snap by casting Glacial Blast as necessary. When using Wrath of Winter, you can fit several Glacial Blasts and Ice Comets in a single Winter’s Embrace.
- Wrath of Winter
- Ice Blitz
- Winter’s Blessing
- Bursting Ice
- Ice Comet (3+ targets)
- Glacial Blast
- Flight of the Navir
- Freezing Torrent
- Cold Snap
- Frost Bolt
Rime Gearing Guide
You’ll want to focus on maximizing your ability to do damage in your burst windows, while also increasing your ability to scale. Currently there are several weapons and sets that are viable for pushing but these just edge out due to their scaling.
- Weapons
- Voidbringer’s Touch (Recommended) (Updated 11/20/2025)
- Apply Voidbringer’s Touch to target enemy for 15 seconds, causing 10% of all damage you deal to any enemy to be replicated and stored in the effect.
Once Voidbringer’s Touch expires, or a total of 4250% Primary Stat has been accumulated, the effect erupts in a shadowy explosion, instantly dealing the accumulated damage to the target.
Voidbringer’s Touch always triggers if the damage it holds is greater than the remaining health of the enemy it is applied to.
- Apply Voidbringer’s Touch to target enemy for 15 seconds, causing 10% of all damage you deal to any enemy to be replicated and stored in the effect.
- Chronoshift
- Create an arcane anomaly while channeling up to 3 seconds, causing you to pulse 576% Primary Stat damage every 1.5 seconds to all enemies in a large radius around you.
While channeling Chronoshift you gain 800% increased cooldown recovery and are protected by a temporal barrier, causing you to take 50% reduced damage.
- Create an arcane anomaly while channeling up to 3 seconds, causing you to pulse 576% Primary Stat damage every 1.5 seconds to all enemies in a large radius around you.
- Voidbringer’s Touch (Recommended) (Updated 11/20/2025)
- Gems
- We’re still experimenting, but as of now we recommend Amethyst 10, Topaz 9, and Ruby 1.
- This requires:
- 5 Splendid Amethyst, 5 Splendid Topaz, and 1 Small Ruby
- 1 100% Legendary Essence Bonus socket
- 8 35% Essence Bonus sockets
- Calculator Link
- Sets
- Draconic Might
- Your critical strikes have a chance (0.9 PPM) to increase your Intellect by 18% for 15 seconds.
- Draconic Might
- Legendary
- Skandi’s Sabatons of Endless Winter – Boots
- Your Bursting Ice lasts 2 seconds longer.
- Skandi’s Sabatons of Endless Winter – Boots
Rime Best in Slot Weapons and Traits

Why Voidbringer’s Touch?
A powerful damage profile many players overlook is priority target damage. Without Voidbringer’s Touch, Rime generally does all single target or all area of effect damage. You can opt to use Glacial Blasts in place of Ice Comets as priority damage, but then you lose out on anywhere from 40-60% of your potential damage. Voidbringer gives Rime the capability to do priority damage without sacrificing her area of effect damage. On the contrary, heroes get to use their area of effect damage to quickly trigger the Voidbringer effect.

Why Chronoshift?
While this weapon doesn’t bring the priority damage Voidbringer’s Touch does, it shortens your cooldowns and does a hefty amount of area of effect damage. Paired with Visions of Grandeur and Inspired Allegiance you’ll be getting several additional uses of Wrath of Winter per run and much more uptime on your Ice Blitz. One of the minor benefits of this build, is having more freedom on when to use Wrath of Winter due to having increased spirit generation. With perfect usage, this can be the highest throughput build for Rime, but it’s hard to beat the strength of Voidbringer’s Touch.
We recommend you not worry about specific pieces of gear until you’re pushing Eternal content. Even a random assortment of stats, gems, and sets will get you through most content.
Gearing Priority
- Weapon
- Legendary Item
- Item Level
- Substat Priority
Rime Stat Priority Guide
Substats have the following effect for Rime:
- Critical Strike – Chance for damage effects to critically strike, doubling their effect. Many of Rime’s talents have interaction with Critical Strike as well, such as Biting Cold and Frostweaver’s Wrath.
- Grievous Critical Strike – Causes any critical strike chance you have above 100% to contribute to the base damage of a critical strike.
- Explanation: If you have 110% Critical Strike chance and your ability does 1000 damage, the Grievous Critical Strike would deal 2100 damage. (1000 * 0.10) + (1000 * 2).
- Expertise – Increases all damage, healing and absorption effects triggered by Rime.
- Haste – Decreases cooldown of charge abilities, increases casting speed, speeds up the tick rate of damage and healing effects, and shortens the global cooldown.
- Spirit – Increases the rate you charge your spirit ability. Every 1% of Spirit gives an increasing chance to refund any Winter Orbs spent when using abilities that cost Winter Orbs.
- Formula:
Spirit% / (1 + Spirit%)
- Formula:
Substat Priority
Haste and Expertise are generally close in value, but as you gain Haste expertise will quickly surpass it. With the amount of free Critical Strike in this build, Critical Strike loses value here.
Haste > Expertise >= Critical Strike >> Spirit
Rime Legendary Guide
These legendaries are sorted from best to least best based on the build we’ve recommended. Remember some legendaries might work better with other builds so if you don’t get Skandi’s Sabatons, try out one of our alternative builds above.
- Skandi’s Sabatons of Endless Winter (Feet)
- Your Bursting Ice lasts 2 seconds longer.
- Frostwyrm’s Spite (Back)
- Each tick of your Freezing Torrent grants you 1 stack of Frostwyrm’s Spite for 15 seconds, up to 10 stacks. Your Cold Snap consumes all stacks of Frostwyrm’s Spite, increasing its damage by 6% per stack. Additionally, your Cold Snap hits 1 additional enemy near your target for each stack it consumes.
- Eldrin Amulet of Undulating Spirits (Neck)
- Your abilities have a 10% chance to make your next spender ability trigger a Spirit Refund.

















