Flay is too important, is it viable to do an actual Cold Caster Lich?

It looks like to play a frosty lich in the new season you HAVE to go with Flay. Even though Flay is a cool addition it feels kinda weird that a cold lich has no caster variation without being a much inferior version of using Flay.

  • Chaosbolt Frostbite - definitely Flay trigger is better. Flay sends orders of magnitudes more chaos bolts per second.
  • Marrow Shards Crit - does Frigid Shards even convert Bone Splinters? The description says it only applies to the base physical damage of Marrow Shards.
  • Marrow Shards is also triggered by Flay with crit support. Does not look like a self cast variant can compete with the attack speed triggers.

Would be really nice if frost caster lich can be somewhat viable compared to the Flay version. Otherwise it’s possible 99% of the new lich builds will just be Flay triggering X. It’s a cool skill but this is not great for build diversity with Lich being under the spotlight now.

Happy to be corrected & open to suggestions since I’ve been theorycrafting a frosty caster Lich but can’t really come up with anything semi competitive lol.

Frost Lich is in a bad state and that’s it. I don’t know why EHG implemented frost option that look like rap. Maybe I miss something but it looks like everyone who trys to play a frost Lich is gimping themself.