Lich Frost Mage Endgame Build

Introduction

Have you ever wanted to lead an army of undead into combat as an immortal Lich, chilling your enemies to their very core with icy explosions and curses, and shrugging off hits that would devastate a mere mortal? This is the guide for you! A collaborative work by GhazzyTV and Lollash. If you have any questions or feedback to provide, please feel free to drop by our streams!

If you are looking for a guide to help you through the campaign, you should check out the leveling guides available here.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Build Mechanics

The Lich Frost Mage build offers the best of both worlds: automated damage application from
Skeletal Frost Mage Minions, and on-demand burst from their Command: Ice Blast skill. While slightly lower damage than some other minion choices, the consistent application of freeze will prevent even Pinnacle Bosses from attacking you periodically. The combination of Evasion and Energy shield gives you solid avoidance and a large Effective Hit Pool, and automated weapon swapping tech gives you large damage boosts for more difficult encounters, such as league content or unique Bosses.

Skill Rotation

Map Clear Skill Rotation

While clearing maps, you will want to stay close to your minions while they deal damage, casting your Hypothermia, Frost Bomb, and Pain Offering regularly to boost their damage output. You can also provide on-demand burst damage by using Command: Ice Blast to help deal with large packs of enemies quickly.

• Cast Frost Bomb and/or Hypothermia to shred enemy resistances
• Cast Pain Offering to significantly boost your minions basic ability damage
• Cast Command: Ice Blast to drop large, high damage frost explosions on large packs
• Cast Convalescence whenever you see your Energy Shield start getting low

Boss/League Mechanic Skill Rotation

Execute the steps below to optimize damage against bosses.

1. Cast Sigil of Power
2. Keep Hypothermia applied, and Pain Offering active
3. Keep Exposure active on the enemy by casting Frost Bomb at least once every 8 seconds
4. Cast Command: Ice Blast when safe to do so to add burst damage/increase freeze build up

Gameplay Tips

Due to the Ascendancy Node Necromantic Conduit, you will want to try to keep your mana above 35% at all times. This is generally easy to achieve due to the strong mana regeneration gained from Soulless Form. When placing your Sigil of Power, you will want to try and make sure your minions are positioned inside of it, and you will always want to immediately follow it up with Hypothermia to ensure you swap back to your primary weapon set and resummon your minions as soon as possible inside its area of effect.

If your minions get stuck on the map geometry, you can tell them to reposition by using the “Direct Minions” key bind (default ` on PC), or you can simply try and outrange them to summon them directly to a different position. This can be a risky strategy, as it often leads to you moving through more monster packs, but when used properly, it can speed up your map clear.

Another option for repositioning minions is by quickly swapping to your second weapon set, either by casting Sigil of Power and then Hypothermia, or by double-tapping your Weapon Set Swap key (Default keybind is X on PC). While this allows you to rapidly and deliberately place your Skeletal Frost Mages, there will be a slight delay before they start casting, and if any of your minions are dead, it will fail. You should ONLY use this if you do not currently have a minion resurrection timer active.

Video Guide

Skill and Support Gems

The Active Skills used in this build all fill a supportive role, either cursing the enemies to increase their damage taken or providing powerful buffs to your minions. To help with mana management, you can choose to keep Hypothermia and Frost Bomb at a lower level (we recommend somewhere between level 15-17) as these skills don’t gain a great deal of power through gem levels.

The following Support Gems are listed in order of socket priority for each Skill.
NOTE: Each skill needs to be assigned to a specific weapon set as noted underneath it.

Skill Gem	Support 1	Support 2	Support 3	Support 4
Hypothermia (Set 1)	Hex Bloom	Heightened Curse	Focused Curse	—
Pain Offering (Set 1)	Ablation	Font of Blood	Meat Shield	Danse Macabre
Frost Bomb (Set 1)	Strip Away	Spell Cascade	—	—

Spirit Gems

As a Minion-focused build, you will want to acquire as much Spirit as possible. You will want to acquire a Terracotta Soldier spectre from the Lost City in the underground of Act 2. NOTE: There are multiple variants; you will specifically want the one that only costs 10 spirit; they are the clay soldiers that only come to life when you get close. We use one of these to boost the damage gained from Muster support on our primary damage minions. Here is a list of the minions you will want to summon based on priorities:

• 1x Skeletal Storm Mage Shock Bot
• 1x Bind Spectre: Terracotta Soldier
• 1x Skeletal Cleric
• 2-3x Skeletal Frost Mage Icy Blast configured minions
• As many Skeletal Frost Mage DPS as you can fit
• 2x Skeletal Warrior (Free from Rattling Sceptre)

The following Support Gems are listed in order of socket priority for each Skill.
NOTE: Each skill needs to be assigned to a specific weapon set as noted underneath it.

Spirit Gem	Support 1	Support 2	Support 3	Support 4	Support 5
Skeletal Frost Mage DPS (Set 1)	Feeding Frenzy	Arcane Tempo	Muster	Minion Mastery	Scattershot (Can choose to swap to Wildshards for clearing)
Skeletal Frost Mage Icy Blast (Set 1 and 2)	Spell Echo	Bidding	Commandment	Inspiration	Cold Mastery
Skeletal Storm Mage Shock Bot (Set 1)	Conduction	Overcharge	Coursing Current	Stormfire	—
Skeletal Cleric (Set 1)	Last Gasp	Ingenuity	Elemental Army	—	—
Bind Spectre Terracotta Soldier (Set 1)	Blind	Infernal Legion	—	—	—
Convalescence (Set 2)	Persistence	Second Wind	—	—	—
Skeletal Warrior (Set 1)	Deathmarch	Sacrificial Lamb	Culling Strike	Maim	—
Sigil of Power (Set 2)	Magnified Effect	—	—	—	—

Ascendancy

The Lich Ascendancy provides us with some very powerful tools. We get excellent mana sustain from Soulless Form and, in combination with Eternal Life, a strong source of generic damage reduction and conditional immunity to poison and bleed. Necromantic Conduit gives us additional chaos damage to help improve our damage, and Crystalline Phylactery provides a flexible jewel socket that doubles the power of the modifiers on the jewel socketed in it, and will be used once a suitably high-value jewel is acquired. This can add significant defense, offense, or both!

Here is a list of the ascendancy points you will take, and in which order. If you need some tips or tricks for Ascending, check out our Trial of the Sekhemas and Trial of Chaos guides.

1. Necromantic Conduit
2. Soulless Form
3. Crystalline Phylactery
4. Eternal Life

Passive Skill Tree, PoB, and Venom Draughts.

The passive tree for this build utilizes weapon set passive points to leverage the power of a Chiming Staff in our second weapon set, and various duration and area of effect passives.

Weapon Set Passive Trees are acquired as you play through the campaign. They allow you to take up to 24 of your total passive points and place them twice, once for your Weapon Set 1, and another for your Weapon Set 2. You can choose to assign points to a weapon set in the top right corner of your Passive Skill Tree window instead of assigning them to your “general” passive tree.

Jewels

The beneficial affixes for Jewels are listed below, ranked in order of importance. Prioritize Rare Jewels with 2 prefixes and 2 suffixes.

• Prefixes
  1. % increased Energy Shield
  2. Minions deal % increased Damage
  3. % increased Energy Shield Recharge Rate
• Suffixes
  1. Minions have % increased Critical Hit Chance
  2. Minions have % increased Critical Damage Bonus
  3. Minions have % increased Attack and Cast Speed

Venom Draughts, Titan Medallion, and Quest Rewards

Throughout the Campaign, you will be provided with some quest rewards where you are required to make a choice. Here are the optimal options for each:

• Titan Medallion 1 – 30% increased Charm Charges gained
• Venom Crypt 1 – 25% increaed Mana Regeneration rate
• Titan Medallion 2 – 30% increased Charm Charges gained
• Venom Crypt 2 – +10% to Chaos Resistance

If you would like more information on the rewards you can earn while playing through the campaign, you can always check out our Campaign Difficulties and Permanent Stat Bonuses guide!

Path of Building

Path of Building is a fantastic community-made tool that lets you see how any change you make to your character’s skill tree, gear, or skill gems will impact you. If you haven’t used POB before, you can find a useful beginner’s guide here.

Included in the POB below are some cheaper variants of this build if you’d like to play it before you have a little currency to spend and are lower level. Check the notes section in the POB for more details.

Lich Frost Mage POB

Gear

Below, we’ve included a gear table with a guide on what affixes you should pursue. Many fields are empty or only have 1-2 affixes listed. This is due to the adaptive nature of gear in Path of Exile 2. While each of the listed affixes is very important, making sure you have the required attributes (Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence) as well as capping your Resistances are goals you must achieve for the build to function properly.

We are using a Rattling Sceptre in our main hand to give us a target for our Pain Offering, and our offhand is the Sunsplinter unique buckler introduced in 0.2.0. This unique provides between 1-3 additional levels to All Cold Skills. If you cannot afford it, you can choose to use any Shield or Focus with Resistances, Attributes, or other defensive properties, but your damage will suffer significantly.

In weapon set 2, you will use a Chiming Staff, granting you the use of the Sigil of Power skill. The level of the granted skill is dependent on the item level of the staff and is important, as higher-level versions of the skill provide additional spell damage to your minions.

Equipment Slot and Base Stats	Prefixes	Suffixes
Main Hand (Rattling Sceptre)	1. % increased Spirit (If it grants extra minions) 2. % increased Minion Damage	1. +# to Level of all Minion Skills 2. % increased Minion Cast Speed 3. % increased Minion Crit Chance or Damage
Off Hand (Sunsplinter Unique)		1. +# to Level of all Cold Skills
Main Hand Set 2 (Chiming Staff)		1. +# to Level of all Spell Skills 2. % increased Cast Speed
Helm (Energy Shield Base)	1. % increased Energy Shield 2. +# Energy Shield	1. +# to Level of all Minion Skills
Body (Evasion Base)	1. +# to Spirit 2. % increased Evasion Rating 3. +# Evasion Rating	1. +# to required Resistances and Attributes
Gloves (Energy Shield Base)	1. % increased Energy Shield 2. +# Energy Shield	1. +# to required Resistances and Attributes
Boots (Energy Shield Base)	1. % increased Movement Speed 2. % increased Energy Shield 3. +# Energy Shield	1. +# to required Resistances and Attributes
Amulet (Preferably a Solar Amulet)	1. +# to Spirit	1. +# to Level of all Minion Skills
Rings (Resist or Breach Base)		1. +# to required Resistances and Attributes
Belt (Any Base)		1. +# to required Resistances and Attributes

Socketables

There are a multitude of socketable items (Runes, Soul Cores, Talismans) that can grant additional bonuses when socketed into your gear. You can add additional sockets (up to a maximum) to each gear piece by using Artificer’s Orbs. You should use these sockets to help fix resistances or attributes, or to boost the Evasion or Energy shield of your gear.

If possible, socketing Iron Runes into your Helm and Body Armour will provide the largest defensive bonus, so if you have the option to socket a required resistance or attribute rune into Gloves or Boots or your Shield, that is the more optimal choice.

With the introduction of sockets on Sceptres, you now have some added power available. It is recommended that you add a socket to your Sceptre and insert one of these Talismans

• Primate Talisman – 30% increased Damage
• Owl Talisman – 8% increased Cast Speed

Flasks and Charms

Flask Affixes

• Life Flask
  • % of Recovery applied Instantly
  • Gains X Charges per Second
• Mana Flask
  • % of Recovery applied Instantly
  • Gains X Charges per Second

Charms

Charms in order of priority:

1. Thawing Charm
2. Stone Charm
3. Resistance Charm or Rarity Charm

Changelog

April 23, 2025: Guide created for Path of Exile 2, Patch 0.2.0, Early Access.