Instead, we have to fight only when we have Frost Nova or Flame Shield. Since we are playing a melee build, we can't literally dodge every attack.

Finally, if the Barrier solution fails (it will fail in Nightmare Dungeons), then we are left with the 'don't get hit' strategy.So we mostly ignore Armor, apart from Skulls in Jewelry and Aspect of Disobedience. However, in most cases, we can't stack Armor high enough to make it better than Damage Reduction rolls. Armor can be a good source of Damage Reduction, but only if you can stack enough of it.If we can stack enough to make our Barrier survive a hit then everything is easy, as we can just cast Ice Armor and not worry about anything for 6 seconds. A lot of these stats can be found on Chests, Pants, Amulets, and some of our Paragon Boards. We stack as much of it as possible, mostly going for Damage Reduction, Damage Reduction from Close/Distant Enemies and Damage Reduction from Burning Enemies. Since a Barrier cannot exceed our Base Life, we can't bolster it any further by stacking Max Life or Barrier Generation. With our high and consistent damage output, the Barrier will instantly refresh as long as it's not broken in one hit. Mostly coming from Ice Armor, it is our main defense outside Nightmare Dungeons. Frost Nova is effectively 100% Close Damage Reduction against non-Bosses, Flame Shield makes you immortal and Ice Armor is Flame Shield with 3x the duration at best or a protective layer that almost doubles your HP at worst. As with our damaging skills, our powerful Defensive Skills are not doing much if we cannot cast them. We still want to have some Crit Chance to let our Ice Shards Enchantment and Teleport proc various on-crit effects. Critical Strike Chance doesn't directly buff our damage because Firewall can't crit.This stat becomes useful after we get the Burning Instinct Node, ranking somewhere between Attack Speed and Intelligence. We want most of the normal offensive stats: Weapon Damage, Vulnerable Damage, Attack Speed, Intelligence, and all kinds of Additive Damage, in that order of priority. Letting it slowly drain is completely fine because we have Supreme Inferno to bail us out. We need to stack enough Mana Cost Reduction and Resource Generation to spam Firewall freely, but not to the point where our Mana is always full. The next skill we want to use is Firewall, which has a Mana cost instead of a Cooldown. We continue to chase our philosophy of being able to use skills = good. More uptime on Barrier from Ice Armor or Protection, activating Conceited and Storm Swell (1.5x damage buff).More uptime on Vulnerable and Freeze from Frost Nova (about a 7x damage buff against single targets, and even more than that in AoE).What good are our skills if we can't use them because they are on cooldown? In purely offensive terms, CDR gives us the following:

This is the most important stat for any Sorcerer build.

Caged scales