I think it depends on areas you wanna farm. From my understanding it's optimal to choose areas with less/none cold immunes when running blizz spec.

There is nearly no way to skip insight I believe.

This post was edited by Jojos on Jul 9 2026 08:41am

farming specific areas is a little less relevant with how shards and act clearing is now a thing, but doom and fathom are obviously the top 2 contenders. as in, you wont go wrong running one or the other. just get to 105fcr
for good tele and ice blast frame rates.

ever heard of mana potions?

with some maek you can for sure make it work if youre not trigger happy.

Farming specific areas is actually more relevant now since you wanna clear faster and then just go next game and repeat. You don't wanna be stuck there blasting random mob packs for more than few seconds in order to achieve more clear % on area if we're talking bout heralds.

debatable. but burning lots of shards is definitely doable now since they drop so frequently.

Yep, that’s my point. Fathom is for sure better unless you put the 20 points into orb instead of cold mastery. You gimp yourself hard by using doom. Also the orb spec sucks anyways. Just use glacial spike if you want some extra aoe. It does 4k damage. Ice blast does 7k.

A 20% increase of damage against 5% of the mobs (none of which have high hp except some yetis and passage mobs in a5) is way worse than a 50% damage increase against 95% of the mobs lo

Conviction Aura is great, but it’s only worth -17 cold resist because you’re already hard capped -200 on non immunes. It’s way better for fire and light because cold mastery is op.

Just go straight damage and run a shako and get everything you want. The runes for infinity can buy the entire characters gear, insight way better for qol


This post was edited by ahyp on Jul 9 2026 09:56am

There are about 440 "base" monsters (different names & resistances, e.g blood clan in tower cellar & blood clan in halls of pain would be two monsters).
About 130 are innately cold-immune (29.5%, but with affixes the actual percentage is a bit higher).
7 have between 80 and 95% cold resist (duriel).
25 have 70 to 75% resist (mephisto).
8 have 60 to 66% resist (andy).
66 have 40 to 50% (baal, diablo).
40 have 33%.
39 have 15 to 25%.
120 have 0% cold resist.


Of the non-cold immunes,
~38.7 are at 0.
~51.3% are 25 or less.
~64.2% are 33 or less.
~85.5% are 50% or less.
~88.7% are 66% or less.
~96.8% are 75% or less.

Anything that isn’t straight up immune is at -100 cold resist
What about frequency? For example finger mages in chaos, there are like 10 of them, when there is like 75+ non cold immunes

You're welcome to count the frequency of each monsters appearance and average that out over ~100 runs (to be safe).


Doom does more dmg vs immunes. Fathom does more dmg everywhere else.
Doom pairs better with blizzorb. Fathom pairs better with pure blizz (pure blizz has 20 points in CM, doom -% resist helps make up for the gap).
Cold immunes will slow you down on lower pcount more than on higher pcount (you one-shot most things in low pcount except immunes).
Pure blizz usually performs better on higher pcount than blizzorb does.

conclusion:
doom and fathom aren't as a different as you think

you can skip insight with an es mana build, but no real reason not to use it really even here