f13.net

So I figure we need threads for the individual classes, so here's one for Wizzy. I've got mine up to ~23 so far and loving it. Until recently just getting meteor, I was using the following build:

Actives:
Electrocute (Chain Lightning)
Disintegrate
Frost Nova (the one that makes additional frost novas when things die)
Wave of Force (Stun instead of snare)
Diamond Skin (Prism, reduced AP cost of skills while it's up)
Explosive Blast

Passives:
Power Hungry
Prodigy

I generally cast Explosive Blast as I run into a pack, put up Diamond Skin then Frost Nova. Wait a second, then hit Wave of Force so it goes off right when EB does. Then Disintegrate anything still moving, using Electrocute to regain mana as needed. I'm not sure which skill to drop for Meteor, or if I should rearrange my build around it (instead of focusing on PBAoEs). How's everyone else playing the Wizzy?

Yes, I just made this thread because the servers are down and I'm bored. Sue me.

I'm always grouping so I'm going for the 'glass cannon' (even took the passive)

At 22, here's my current build:

Electrocute (Chain lighting)
Disintegrate
Frost Nova (Cooldown reduction)
Hydra
Familiar
Explosive Blast

Passives:
Glass Cannon
CD Reduction

I can toss frost novas every few seconds now, which helps mitigate a lot of damage if I do a stick & weave on the melee chars.  Electrocute is my primary and then disintegrate once they're packed-together.    I'll drop Hydra if there's a bigger pack or a yellow/ purple mob.  I haven't found much use for EB in this build so I'm debating changing to the 'pick your build' option and putting Wave of Force w/ stun in to it or a defensive spell so I don't assplode so quick.  Or perhaps whirlwind.. which was fun for big packs but kid of useless on bosses.

I'm playing solo, level 25:

Damage:

Magic Missile (Charged Blast)
Arcane Orb (Obliteration)
Hydra (Arcane Hydra)

Defense/Utility:

Frost Nova (Shatter)
Diamond Skin (Crystal Shell)
Ice Armour (Chilling Armour)

Passives:

Evocation (-cooldowns)
Astral Mind (++ Arcane Power and Regen)

Setting up a hydra at the start of fight and then using Arcane Orb when I have the power, and missile when I don't seems to work best for me. I like the range on magic missile and it's high speed. Diamond skin is too useful as an 'oh shit' button for me to give up, and the frost nova with shatter is just fantastic when combined with arcane orb. I have managed to chain novas 3 or 4 times with this, which is usually ample time to finish off most packs. Ice Armour is useful since you seem to invariably end up stuck in the middle of things paying solo, and survivability is a win.

I'm using the templar as a companion, with most of the tanky abilities (charge, intervene, etc). I haven't really tried either of the others, but I don't see how they would synergise as well.

I like the variety of abilities, but there's a bunch I haven't found much use for:

Mirror Image - Seems less useful than Diamond Skin as an escape, and the images don't do any damage.
Magic Weapon - Could replace Ice armour in groups where you are getting focused less, solo it's less good I feel. Pretty boring too.
Shock Pulse - Just seems inferior to Magic Missile and Electrocute in every way.
Arcane Torrent - Aiming this seems to be a pain,

Perhaps as I get runes some other abilities will become more appealing. In general, given the constraints of arcane power, I think you want something like this:

1) Signature spell (Either Magic Missile, or Electrocute depending on preference)
2) Arcane Power DPS ability (and AoE ability (Orb, Twister, Blast) if you took Missile, a single-target ability (Ray of Frost, Disintergrate) if you took electrocute).
3) CC - Frost Nova
4)

Played a little with the Wizard last night. Meh. Missile is ok...but slower than I like (and I play a WD with Frogs slotted...so yeah). Frost Ray Gun thing was also a bit jarring, but interesting. I might play that character down the road, but right now there is nothing that makes me say MUST use this charcter.

Arcane Torrent is pretty powerful but just not as fun as Disintegrate.  It's as easy to aim as any other spell, easier if you have problems aiming at monsters themselves since it does aoe damage.  If you pair it with the Disruption rune you're doing 201% weapon damage. Woo.

I'm rethinking evocation.  I don't see that I have as many CDs as I'd originally thought, so it's probably not all that useful right now.

Mirror Image doesn't seem like it would be useful at all until level 58 when they do damage.. but even then it's only 10% weapon damage.  Uninspiring to say the least.  This 4th active slot is what will get me to turn off 'suggested' skill layouts because Archon is the only one I can see making decent use of and that doesn't happen until level 30.

I can't work out if Prodigy or Astral Mind is better for power regen, but you could try those.

Good question.  Instinct says Prodigy but I don't have the math to back that up. I'm sure someone's already done it on one of the D3 sites.

Wow, Archon is awesome. Dropped Diamond Skin for it, although I'm not sure if that's the best call. Still using a PBAoE build like in the OP while solo, using the Enchantress follower because she stays back and CCs for me.

In groups I was using something like the following when we finished Act 4:
Electrocute (Chain Lightning)
Disintegrate (Chaos Nexus)
Archon
Blizzard (Grasping Chill)
Diamond Skin (Prism)
Meteor (Molten Impact)

Let the melee pack the mobs up and rain death from above!

1) Shock Pulse (explosive bolts)
2) Arcane Orb (damage)
3) Explosive Blast
4) Hydra

Utility:

1) Frost Nova (shatter)
2) Magic Weapon

Passive:

1) Power Hungry
2) Glass Cannon

There's a pretty well honed risk/reward here: comparative safety at long range vs. quick results at short range. Shock pulse is pretty close quarters but can tear through packs of weak mobs with explosion rune (try this out). I play close. Shock pulse / arcane orb chains frost nova, which allows for easy explosive blast, which creates more mana through health orbs that are virtually at my feet (via power hungry), which I can then feed into more arcane orbs for anything left standing. If things go wrong things get hairy; if things go right everything dies very fast. This might not work in the long run but it's fun enough going through act 2 and 3.

Blizzard is pretty awesome.

So, I just got

Disintegrate, Beam of 155 weapon damage arcane

which is similar to

Ray of Frost, Beam of 215 weapon damage frost on first enemy + 30% slow


So Ray of Frost seems to be the better single target spell while Disintegrate is good for more than one enemy (if standing in a line^^)

Is that correct or did I miss anything?

Disntegrate also looks freaking amazing!

(and has synergies with other arcane boosting stuff whereas you don't seem to get frost boosting stuff until later on).

Yeah, Ray is the best single-target but costs arcane.  When I hit 28 I'm seriously considering picking it with the cold blood rune.  It's listed as reducing casting cost to 0.  If it really does cost nothing, it'll be fantastic for bosses while I'm recharging Arcane Torrent.

I got meteor last night and it's lots of fun, particularly in dungeons with choke points.  Frost nova - Meteor - run back and chain lighting for another meteor.   :drill:

Archon is really fun, but somewhat situational. It's only good when you have a ton of low-hp minions to kill to keep the duration going.

I hit 11 or 12 last night, is there a breakpoint where this class becomes more fun/powerful?

I think you get Disintegrate at 21, which is all kinds of fun. My wiz is still 13 or 14. The Tornado spell thing is pretty amusing, but not sure how powerful it actually is.

It's not an OP class and it's fragile.  If you like getting in melee or playing solo I can't recommend the class.  It works best when someone else is in there corralling the mobs and taking the face hits.

It's definitely felt more powerful as I've leveled-up and gotten more skills.  Arcane Barrage or runed Arcane Orb are the two most powerful spells if you're looking pure throughput. Disintegrate is fun for pure pew-pew lasers and large swaths of monsters.

Definitely see if you're keeping up with the best weapon possible and offhand focus by scouring the AH.  It makes a huge difference when you're upgrading those, as the folks in the AH thread indicate.    I'd say if you're not having fun by 21 the class just isn't for you, give another a go. 

This, yep yep. I was feeling pretty weak at around 14 until I decked myself out in the AH.

Thirded. I've just turned my wizard from a weak and squishy coward into a near-fearless avenging angel of firey death thanks to 30 mins on the AH.

I switched from Frost Nova to Diamond Skin too and that has greatly increased my survivability. The difference is that you can pop DS just before charging into a pack of mobs, thus preventing the first wave of hits on you. With FN they landed a load of hits on me before I cast it.

I find Diamond Skin to be too useful as an emergency button to ditch it, especially in nightmare. Once you start hitting those rare/elite packs with ability combos that trap and nuke you it is a life saver. I'm not sure I could fit in another Arcane Power ability anyway, since I already have Hydra and one other, so I don't feel like I'm giving much up for it. I find my Wizard pretty punchy, but when I do die it's usually very fast.

I'm pretty set on Diamond Skin, Frost Nova and Hydra as core abilities. I'm alternating between Magic Missile and Electrocute for my signature; spectral blade is too short ranged, and shock pulse is too hard to aim, even with the level33 rune.

I'm mainly using Arcane Orb as my AP dump, it's DPS, aimability, cost and AoE all seem to hit a sweet spot. I have messed around with the others but none of them seem to work so well in general. Twister is too hard to aim, Disintegrate Aiming just feels clunky, Ray of Frost is only single-target DPS, but most of the time I want an AoE, Blizzard I use sometimes but its DPS seems to be a lot lower than Arcane Orb, Meteor is Fun but again, it's hard to aim for maximum effectiveness. Wave of Force has a cooldown, and Explosive Blast is limited by being a PBAoE. Arcane Torrent becomes interesting with the mines rune, but summoning Hydra despawns your mines so...

I dropped Ice Armour for Slow Time with the rune to make mobs take more damage, seems to be nice. I sometimes swap it out for Archon, and I might try Teleport there.

Magic Weapon, Familiar, Mirror Image all seem pretty crap still.

In-game it says it reduces it to 12.  I still use Ray of Frost with Snow Blast (+damage when on one target) for bosses and such, but the rest of the time in Normal I was running with Disintegrate with Convergence (wider beam).

I think Energy Twister and Meteor are really cool, but they're kind of a hassle to use in a quickly-moving co-op game.  Here's what I was using at the end of Normal (with a Monk/Barb/DH): http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#UiXdjQ!Xcb!aaaaaa (http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#UiXdjQ!Xcb!aaaaaa)

Only thing I'll add is that for my needs Wave of Force with Impactful Wave (stun) was enough on the defensive side to replace Frost Nova, and it does damage.  And yes, I really can't pull myself away from Diamond Skin.

I am looking forward to replacing Sparkflint Famaliar with Force Weapon though, as it's just plain better.  I might run both if I'm solo as I don't need Teleport AS much there.

The level 36 runed version of electrocute is  :awesome_for_real:

I found the best way to use twister was to rune it to cost less arcane power, and the combine it with diamon darin with the rune that reduces arcane power cost. I could happily toss 12 tornadoes into  a room and *nothing* survived that amount of damage.

My (27) wizard is hooked on arcane orb. It blows everything up nice and easy along with the Power Hungry passive.

I'm actually a huge fan of Archon. My plan at 50 is to set the Critical Miss and Evocation passives, stack all +Crit on my gear and see if I can get near 100% uptime (ideally without having to use Archon's CD reduction rune). If I can, I'm probably going to run something like this:

Archon (Arcane Destruction until Imp Archon, unless I need Pure Power)
Magic Weapon (Force Weapon)
Familiar (Sparkflint)
Energy Armor (Pinpoint Barrier)

I'm not sure what I'll use for the last two skills. Probably Diamond Skin in case the stars don't align and I get stuck out of Archon for very long, and a Signature skill so I can do some damage while caught in human form. I'm not sure how well it will work but I'll see in ~10 levels.

Interesting idea; I think you'll get murdered by some of the rare packs without any escapes other than teleport though. I guess it depends on your DPS. In nightmare there are already some combinations of rare/elite mob ability that can instagib you if you are unlucky. Any combo that traps you e.g. Jailer or Frozen, combined with a high DPS ability like Arcane, Mortar or Chains can ruin you very fast.

Currently I'm very comfortable with a kite-build on Nightmare: Diamond Skin (++Absorb), Frost Nova (+Shatter), Poison Hydra, Teleport (+Safe), Electrocute (+pew pew lasors), Blizzard (+Lingering Chill). Keep Blizzard and Hydra between yourself and the mobs and laser them to death. if anything gets too close you can use Frost Nova, Diamond Skin or Teleport to escape. It works well for me, and seems to do well on bosses or packs where you need to kite around a lot.

I'm also playing around with the stun on electric damage, but it doesn't seem to proc very often.

I'm in love with my meteor spam build. Seems okay for nightmare, but watching 5 meteors smack into the ground around me throwing everything up in the air is brilliant fun and surprisingly high damage.

What's the opinion on the two "passive" dps-enhancer spells:

Magic Weapon (+10% flat damage increase)
Familiar (Sparkflint rune +12% flat damage increase)

They seem nice when playing lazy, as they are both 5 minute duration. So turn them on and forget about them, while still gaining benefits from the spell-slot.
But do you think they are worth giving up some of the better AOE spells like metors or other utility stuff?


Normal mode doesn't really seem to give a good idea for later game builds. Right now at lvl 31 gameplay boilds down to  standing there with a wide-beam disintegrate murdering pack after pack. AP cost reduced frost-beam for single bosses and when manas run out, but most of the time everything is dead before that.

Magic weapon is bugged and gives significantly more than 10% dps it seems. I go from 678 to 820 when using it, which is a hell of a lot more than 10%. Seems like its applying itself to the weapon twice or something. Sparkling which should be higher only takes me to 759 for example.

Personally I run with one of the passives tops, because the game is a lot more fun with more spells. I have a friend who is playing pretty much that build (both passives, diamond skin, nova, disintegrate and the chain lightning) and whilst it's probably mathematically a superior build its also dull as hell...

Yeah, magic weapon is AWESOME.  Keep in mind it raises your weapon damage, not a flat damage increase after bonuses like sparkflint.  If you've got a slow weapon with a fast attack speed & good attack speed modifiers it will raise your attack quite a bit more.

I don't have any attack speed modifiers and magic weapon is still giving me +20%. It's something to do with the off-hand because the enchant also affects that, but still not actually sure how it is bugged.

If it's including the offhand I'd guess that's at least one part of the bug. 

I've got an increase from 395 to 475 with vs without so we're seeing the same increase.

Wizards are a horrible, horrible class to try and kill Diablo with.  I still haven't done it and I've hit the fight about 25 times now. Solo, grouped, doesn't matter.  Hell, it's worse solo than grouped because he focuses you the entire time.   I've gotten to phase 3 ONCE.

I'm quite annoyed.

What build are you using? I found it to be a complete arse as a wizard, and remarkably un-fun.

I did it after about 8-10 attempts or so I guess? Pretty much the same build I stated up in the thread earlier. Don't worry too much about signature spells, just kite him around the central bridge keeping hydra up near him and dropping blizzards whenever you have the arcane power. The most important thing to dodge is his conflagration attack, as that killed me a lot. If he teleports to you frost nova him and run away. If you get caught in the bone prison (which ideally you shouldn't if you just keep kiting) pop diamond skin as soon as the stun wears off. You'll get odd windows where he's casting something, or just standing there and you can use that time to whittle his HP down using whatever signature spell you prefer (magic missile is probably best).

Take whichever other utility spell you prefer as your sixth (after MM, hydra, Blizzard, FN and DS). Slow time or teleport would probably be good, you can kite him through slow time bubbles to help put distance between him. Use potions on cooldown and play really conservatively in P2, and otherwise just slowly nibble his HP down.

I tried it on a public game but the two Demon Hunters I got grouped with spent about 90% of the fight dead, but kiting with Hydra and Blizzard worked well enough, it just took ages.

But yes, sucky fight.

Using this build, based off comments inthe D3 forum.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#aZXRSP!WXa!abaaaa

I find it impossible to dodge the conflag attack .. It almost always flares within a few feet of me, so I burn and die.  The AOE flares that trace the ground fuck me up, too.

Unfun is exactly how Id put it.  Particularly the wizard shadow clones, whcih seem to have not been nerfed from beta damage to Arcane orb.  One orb from one clone wiped my entire group one attempt.

We killed him last night on Hell; only took us two attempts (phase 2 is fucking awful) with two Wizzies, a Barb and a WD. Frost Nova and DS were pretty essential; we kept him stunned most of the fight. In phase 2 we had the WD use his mind control thing to help manage the adds.

Why Mirror Image, will Diablo actually go for them? You should be able to eat conflags with Diamond Skin if worst comes to worst. I managed to avoid the worst of the AoE flares by virtue of being miles away and letting my hydra and blizzard do the damage. Ray of Frost seems optimistic, I don't see where you'd have enough time to stand around dropping it on him, especially since he can teleport to you. I'd swap it out for blizzard, but that's how I like things, and swap mirror image for frost nova. You're pretty light on escapes there imho.

The healing wells are pretty vital, and that annoys me. The whole orb mechanic was supposed to make healing a more natural part of the fight, and then you go have the final boss drop 0-1 orbs per phase.

I just beat him, finally using that build but with blizzard instead of magic weapon.  :heart:

Diamond Skin was the key.  I just didn't have the survivability without it, even with frost nova.  Which kind of sucks.

Yes, he goes for the Mirror Images.  Saved my ass a few times as he shot the conflag at one instead of me.   The whole fight was done by my low-ass-dps hydra, though. 

ROF is usable because you have to cheese the son of a bitch.  The central parts with the openings and the holes in the nightmare realm keep him occupied long enough to get a ROF off every now and again if you dance around them.  Which you have to do to keep going back to the healing wells.

Well done man!

You managed to buy some potions too then?

Hydra is :heart:

I don't think you're doing Mirror Image justice, I've found it amazing on bosses like Izual and Diablo that hit like trucks. They go for the MI every time I cast it while I can sit back and freely cast on the boss. The cooldown vs duration is such that you can have it active about half the time.

Hydras seem to do far more damage than the tooltip says. Mine absolutely destroys things far faster than 20-30% damage would imply.

As for wizard vs boss: I've found every boss to be cheesed by Diamond Skin/Channeled damage skill (personally, I use arcane torrent because I like it), then kite until Diamond Skin is back up.

This has not helped me when Nightmare decides to throw me up against Molten/Fast/Jailer/Waller in the same packs however.

I just got poison hydra at 38, it's amazing.

Since you're using AT are you also using Disruption rune and Arcane Hydras?  That would account for some part of their extra damage.

As for them doing more than 20-30% WD, what I think is happening is that Hydras are invulnerable and attack pretty damn fast.  So even 20% stacks up when they can attack faster than you could because of the necessity of dodging on your part.   

I was using electric hydras (I don't have the AT disruption effect up for more than increasing it's own damage on trash) and noticed the hydra hitting for about 70% of a normal mob's health in nightmare with about 1200-1400 damage on my char sheet. I'm comparing that to my 80% damage electrocute usually needing to channel for about 3 tics to kill the same target.

I have a feeling we're missing something about tic frequency in the damage stats, too. AT seems to vastly outdamage Ray of Frost for me when I was just using them to waste a boss. While RoF has a much higher damage stat, it just felt like AT was doing a much better job of flattening things in 2-3 impacts.

I will say that my best damage add is Blizzard/slowing fog rune + the 20% more damage to slowed things rune. Blizzard and a Hydra pretty much holds an entire flank for a bit.

I killed Diablo first try with this build:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#bZXRSj!YXc!aZaaaa

Basically just keep Hydra up and kite until Diamond Skin is up.  Once Diamond Skin is up use it and just stand there and DPS him with Ray of Frost.  Rinse and repeat until dead.

I went into Diablo with the same setup I'd been leveling with. I just expected to die and then tweak my skills from there but I killed him first try somehow.

Here's what I've been using. (http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#UiXYdh!aYc!aaaaaa)

I popped explosive blast, ran up to him and frost nova'd, wave of force and then explosive blast would go off. Run away and disintegrate, used diamond skin as needed when I was getting hit. It got hairy twice when I was making a mad dash for the wells with a sliver of health.

So I'd killed Diablo on NM with some friends, but wanted to solo him a) to see if I could and b) because I'm not 50 yet and so I can't start Hell. So I decided to restart Act 4 solo; had a decent time of it aside from certain shitty combos of Elites/Champs (Mortar + Jailor/Waller). Izual however was impossible; his charge ability would one-shot me if I didn't have DS up, but I had to blow it to soak his unavoidable freezes. So I said fuck it and skipped right to Diablo.

Managed to one-shot him on NM, using this build (http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#UZOXYl!fWa!babaZZ). Blizzard did most of the work; RoF let me burn down the Clone in P2 almost instantly, with Frost Nova and DS for when shit got bad. Things got rough a couple times in P3 and I had to LOS his fireballs using the Healing Wells a few times, but I got him.

Evidently this build:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#bRXdOS!fgT!cbacYZ

Is incredibly overpowered.  With even a mild crit-rate (author said he only had 10%) you're able to spam Frost Nova & wave of force because living lighting & the hydra's poison pools (which stack on top of each other) are persistent with fast ticks so you can fish for critical procs with both while running for your life.

It's the GW1 55hp build, basically. The core of the build is not taking ANY vit gear, so the 35% damage cap kicks in on every incoming hit while your health regen instantly restores the loss (since the health regen rate is balanced for you having 20x the hp pool you actually wind up having)

Fishing for crits is just helping your damage out, but the core of the OPness is the energy armor rune, and the stat choices you make around it.

Just solo'd nightmare Diablo on my wizard first try.

Was still dying lots to nightmare champ packs so I had a browse of the Wizard forums and found someone talking about a melee-leech-crit wizard build, thought I'd give it a try. Bought a bunch of +crit/life on hit/regen gear and went to town.

This is the build: http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#WRXYSO!gbf!YbaYYZ

It's fantastic. I am pretty much unkillable. With Venom Hydra spitting out and me spamming Spectral Blades my crit rate (17% base) is high enough that I can keep Diamond Skin up almost constantly when fighting and hit Frost Nova every few seconds. The life steal and regen is high enough that I can just ignore most ground-based stuff like Plagued/Molten pools. Great fun :)

OFC I have zero MF/GF but I'll think about a good farming build later. Gonna give Hell a try later on and also see how it fares in 2/3/4-player nightmare.

That actually looks really fun; need 51 for healing blades though.

Does anyone know if attack speed affects the rate at which hydra and blizzard apply damage (and other abilities)?

I've been running with this meteor build lately for NM hardcore: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#UkXROQ!bXf!aZZbZY (http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#UkXROQ!bXf!aZZbZY)

I usually team up with a monk who's stacking defense/health, so he pulls the mobs in, I hit diamond skin then spam death from above until I'm out of AP. I don't think it's gonna get old for a while, even though the build is a little squishy outside that DS window. For solo it works pretty well since the mobs die fast--they cluster up and pop like bubble wrap.

Level 31, partway through Act IV normal.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#UilRXj!abX!aa.aaa (http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#UilRXj!abX!aa.aaa)

I just switched from Magic Weapon to Familiar with Sparkflint, but having read through this thread, that might not have been the best move w.r.t. damage output. I might have to take a closer look at the numbers.

I love Electrocute with Chain Lightning. It mashes trash packs.
I got the 30-mob Mighty Blow achievement with chain lightning. I was immediately killed by the accompanying mini-boss, of course :)

I use Blizzard and Arcane Hydra for standard AoE purposes, also as fire-and-forget kiting (aka fleeing) aids. I've survived bosses and mini bosses by kiting while Diamond Skin and Quaff are on their cooldowns, and letting Blizzard and Hydra do the work in the meantime.

I haven't finished act IV yet. Or gotten past Normal mode. So, we'll see how well things hold up going forward.

Familiar with Sparkflint is a bigger boost until you get Force Weapon and then Magic Weapon with that is a slightly higher boost.

I'm in Act 4/Nightmare right now at level 49, using this:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#UkXlfR!XYf!ZYYbYb

I switch up my build really often, but I think I finally gave up on channeled spells when soloing, I just can't afford to stand still. Meteor makes most bosses pretty easy since you can concentrate on positioning and just randomly right click the boss to drop a bomb on them. And my hydra and blizzard wipe trash packs. Enduring Skin is the only one I'm iffy on. It helps for things that would never break Diamond Skin during it's short duration anyways, but I've started running into things that will break Skin and hit for 90% of my health as well in a single hit. Right now I'm stuck on the blade armed Act 4 boss, who has a teleport/huge hit skill that I can't dodge and will one shot me without DS up. I think I need more than my 7k health in Act 4 NM. But I'm running with ~2600 damage without using familiar or enchanted weapon.

Something I'd like to see for these spells is some kind of reminder (visual, sound, whatever) that they've worn off. I don't know how many times I've gotten through a fight and then noticed that MW wasn't active.

Agreed, I really wish they had a buff icon like the Armor spells do.

I believe the thought process is "Well it creates a visual on your character, pay better attention!"

This works less well in practice than it should for MW most of the time.  (Unless you do the rune that gives the awesome fire effect.. THAT is noticeable.)

The desire for a buff icon is more "know if it only has 15 seconds left on it before you pull some shit"

I just habitually tap my armor spells between mob packs because I let it drop entirely too often.

This.  I agree it should have a buff icon and/or other reminders, but I've adapted by recasting my spells after every other pull.

:headscratch:

Monk Mantras display an icon above the action bar showing the remaining duration. Wizards don't have something similar?

We do for armors and a few of our proc buffs, but not for Magic Weapon or Familiars.

Yeah, it's just a random inconsistency with two of their buffs.

What Hydra and Ice armor are you using? - Nvm, Poison and Melee Frost nova

I was mucking around with some friend's last night in Act 2 NM underlevel (32 at the start, 36 by the end of the session) and admittedly I would lose a fuckton of hp if I got hit, but I didn't seem to get oneshotted most of the time unless I went into melee with Arcane/Fire Chains etc.

I might switch disintegrate for Meteor and change my Diamond Skin from Prism to Crystal Shell for that extra survivability... What I really do really rate is Power Hungry, in 4 player NM picking up globes means I'm getting my arcane back at a damn fast pace.

This game is like cocaine.  :drill:

The Magic Weapon lack of icon is annoying, yeah. In fact I've got into the habit now of refreshing my buffs every single time there's a 2 second gap between fights, and often during long fights.

Meteor Swarm!  :awesome_for_real:

I want swarm very bad. Meteor is one of my favorite spells.

I got "Death's Cold Embrace" achieve last night and I credit it entirely to Meteor w/ Star Pact.    My current tactic is to run near a swarm, drop a hydra and then circle so the mobs are packed together.  Frost Nova, then spam 3 meteors quickly.. they all explode pdq.

I'm not feeling the love for poison hydra over lighting, though.  It seems like he attacks a lot slower and the bolts don't have the damage of the lighting hydra.  I think it'd be great if I were grouping with people so I had a front line to keep them together but right now it's not so hot.

The extra damage from poison hydra is the acid damage mobs take from being in the vicinity of it. They really drop fast when they are in the acid. It's hard to pull off when soloing though since you'd have to be in melee range to keep them next to the hydra.

Using Blizzard with the rune which gives a chance to freeze mobs in place in combination with Hydra seems to drop things really fast. I switch to lightning Hydra for boss encounters. Frost Hydra seems to have an impractically short range, and as such I couldn't get much use out of it.

One thing that is bugging me right now is the fact that the signature spells are only Lightning or Arcane (with the exception of one runed version of Shock Pulse). It would seemed to have been nicer to have Spectral blades do Cold Damage, and replace Shock Pulse with a fire spell. A minor niggle, but it seems to cut down on some of the flavour of the builds.

Blizzard + Poison Hydra deals a silly amount of damage. I can't really explain it by the numbers, but it seems to be avoiding DR in some way (it murders those hulk things that shield up for example)

You don't need them to stand still in the pools, you just need them slowed a bit while in it. Useless against Fast modifiers, but pretty awesome against everything else. When soloing, use the templar to form melee clusterfucks for the combo to target as well. Drop the hydra in the middle of the melee to force it to attack that mess.

Most of my wizarding consists of blizzard/hydra and then deciding if it's trash that will die to crit electrocutes, or if there's a meat shield in there that should get a comet or two. And then spam blizzard kiting champ packs across half the damned map. Low AP use Blizzard is so awesome for always having them down in front of the mobs.

Something has changed with Critical Mass in the hotfix, it just doesn't seem to work any more. It's made my melee wizard completely non-viable, can't survive a single champion pack now.  :heartbreak:

I expect changes and nerfs etc, but undocumented ones piss me off greatly.

There's nothing on the official hotfix post that just went up about this, and I can't see any posts elsewhere talking about critical mass - what exactly has changed for you? Might it have been you were just unlucky on procs for it? (as it's not a guaranteed chance per crit).

It looks like the proc chance has been reduced, I'm guessing by a lot, like 90% or more. If it was an unlucky streak then it was a statistically miraculous one that spanned several thousand hits.

Basically I used to be able to keep Diamond Skin up nearly 100% of the time and Frost Nova more or less at will as long as I was hitting multiple mobs and had a Venom Hydra up. Now it was as if I just didn't have Critical Mass - I was having to wait the full cooldown duration for both abilities. Makes the build completely useless.

I was playing the build last night in Hell Act 1 and was having a great time, but had nowhere near the uptime you describe there. Suspect you had substantially more crit than my paltry 12.5% buffed!

Yeah but that was last night.  Wasn't the hotfix done today?

If it's like the monk nerf their approach seems to be "Make this useless, we'll patch a real fix later." Which is a ridiculous way to handle things.

No, who I'm saying was pre hot fix today I was playing that build and had nowhere near that uptime on my abilities. Was using blizzard + venom hydra and had a total crit of 12.5% and whilst it definitely made a difference it didn't allow for anywhere near full uptime on nova / diamond skin.

Tried it this afternoon and still seems to play the same as it did for me yesterday, but possibly the nerd was in the form of a cap on the number of props per second? Still trying to find something on other forums about a potential nerf.

12.5% isn't particularly high for crit rate I think. With crit on all your gear you'd have closer to 30% I think?

Oh yes you can get much higher than that easily - I was just playing with the build and found it surprising fun.

I've got 22.5% crit buffed, 27.5% when I get the Frost Nova 5+ targets hit bonus (which was most of the time before the hotfix).

Did a bunch more testing with it yesterday evening and this morning and something's definitely changed. I have my floating damage set to show crits only and I'm critting way less often than I was before the hotfix. It's certainly not 27.5% of my hits, that's for sure. Unfortunately there's no way I can quantify any of this without a combat log or anything, but I ran through Act 3 & 4 Nightmare just to see and it was significantly harder than before. Azmodan Nightmare is a good test - before I didn't need to make any attempt to dodge the meteors or move out of the defile, my DS uptime was entirely capable of absorbing that damage completely. Today I cannot do that, I have to run from both meteors and defile.

I suspect it's an unintended change since I can see no reason not to include a deliberate change in the hotfix notes.

You were using a build to trivialize an entire boss encounter (at the very least) and yet you expect this is a bug and not a stealth nerf?  :oh_i_see:

Completely invalid point IMO.

The boss fights in D3 are all trivial. Changing builds for them is easy to do if you're struggling with one. There are many builds for pretty much all classes that can make one fight or another incredibly easy. I have tried several wizard builds, for instance, that enable risk-free soloing of each and every boss up to the end of Nightmare mode. This isn't Diablo 2, the bosses are useless for gearing up, killing them easily is irrelevant.

The point is that changing mechanics without telling your players is very poor practice, especially in a game with a hardcore mode.

It's one thing to make a boss easy. It's another to say "Man I could just stand in all the fire and not dodge anything, why'd Blizz nerf me" with legitimate surprise. Also, Bilizzard has been doing stealth-nerfs for years in WoW; odds are they'll post about it a few days later when people call them out on the forums once the PR people have an official response. Also, lolhardcoremode.

I still think (with all respect - apologies apocrypha) that we shouldn't rush to assume it has been nerfed or the was a bug, unless the bug was specifically with your character.

This is not a unique build. Is very popular, and Critical Mass as a passive is also hugely popular. I haven't found anying on any other Diablo thread or forum mentioned a nerf to the proc rate or anything. Let's get some more evidence first?

The only change I know of is the one to Force Armor that stopped it from reducing hits that were more than 100% of your health. That one was directed at a wizard build that was letting woefully under-geared people clear inferno when they shouldn't have been able to. If you're not critting as often as your stats would indicate I don't know anything about it, but critical mass doesn't go off on every critical, and as such can have droughts where it doesn't proc regardless of how much you are or aren't critting.

Its probable that this *will* get nerfed in the future however judging by some of the videos already out there of mages tanking elite packs in hell and inferno by through chaincasting nova and diamond skin.

In any case trying to just eyeball a change to crit rate isn't going to lead you to any valid conclusions.

I don't think it'll be a problem, Diamond Skin only absorbs so much damage eventually the mobs just completely outpace it in terms of damage output.

Indeed, however there's nothing else I can do to verify it at this point. Except qualitative tests on things like Azmodan, but being able to kill a boss easily is considered some kind of exploit by some apparently .  :oh_i_see:

Moot point anyway, I've abandoned the build and gone back to the mundane, cookie-cutter blizzard kiting.

I refuse to use that build until inferno, so am sticking with meteor spam. Meteor seems to trigger critical mass quite a bit, and I do love that spell.

There was a post of some wizard stunlocking Diablo on inferno with critical mass.   He'd just spam shock pulse and frost nova.  Frost Nova was coming off cooldown so fast you could barely even see the refresh.  If I had to make a guess they probably hotfixed it by putting an internal cooldown on Critical Mass.

(http://i.imgur.com/hsINP.gif)

The guy soloing inferno diablo.
http://www.justin.tv/zytrug/b/319194200

Mob dps doesn't really matter when all your cooldowns are permanently at zero.  All that matters is how fast you can click.

Game is fun as hell, wizard is fun as hell.  But how shitty do your testers need to be that nobody thought of this?  Or the much more obvious no vit + force armor + diamondskin synergy.  

Edit: this one does the same thing, and he shows off his stats.  Only has 25% crit, but over 3.1 attacks per sec.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJn6QxRdb-Q

Is everyone using wands and sources or have you branched out into swords and boards? I've been going sword and source for a while, +DMG on the source is too good to give up and it doesn't seem the shield gives me much more survivability when I try it.

Two-handers here.  Maces if I can help it for the slower attack speed.


If you're in Act 3/4 Inferno and not just kiting everything, you are a tester.  Critical Mass and/or Paralysis are probably getting ICDs anyway.

Edit: The other option is to nerf Living Lightning as it interacts in a similar way with a ton of passives, Arcane Dynamo being the other one.  Stack that up, Archon, and right-click keeps the buff as long as you hold it down and don't use any of other other abilities.

Why are you going for the slower attack sipped by the way? Hasn't most testing shown there to be no difference in dps because the big one hit spells are normalised from the ds value not the weapon value?

And critical mass was hot fixed yesterday, but this was apparently to resolve the issue around magic weapon - venom blade. I fiddled with it briefly and it was clearly not working right because it was triggering critical mass constantly. But that hot fix only went in yesterday afternoon?

My understanding is that ray spells aren't normalized, and that's what I was using at the end of Hell.  I haven't played my Wizard or done much reading about mechanics since then, so I could be wrong.

Re; the guy stunlocking with Critical Mass/Living Lightning:


They're pretty quick on this. It seems like their intent is to make inferno so crazy that the only way to clear it is with cheeseball specs so that they can root out those builds quickly.

I knew I wasn't imagining it. Problem is that their fixes so far seem to be to just make the skill useless. And not update the tooltips.  :oh_i_see:

I honestly don't see any point at all to Critical Mass now, it's does almost nothing as far as I can tell. I suspect it's not going to be long before we just see a few cookie-cutter builds for each class and all the talk about the flexible skill system being so much ancient history.

We're you using venom weapon?

That's the fix that this hotfix addressed, and apparently it only went live yesteryear as people were still streaming videos of it being abused yesterday afternoon.

It certainly works for me with meteor spam oddly enough - had left it only accident and suddenly noticed my frost nova seemed to take 3 seconds to refresh. Didn't think that the multiple crits you get from a meteor hitting would each trigger it independently.

Each spell probably has it's own %chance to trigger it on a crit.

Nope, was using Force Weapon. This was the build: http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#WRXYSO!bgf!YbaYZZ   It's still mostly viable in Nightmare but the cooldown reduction from Critical Mass is irrelevant now, so if you do want to give it a go I'd ditch that and go with Glass Cannon, or maybe Cold Blooded instead, and not bother stacking crit gear, get more vit instead.

I've switched to this now: http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#aRXlSO!YTf!cbacbb  which is much less fun, but does at least seem to be allowing me to progress in Hell. Just got to the start of Act 4 but I can't beat the first fight with all the shadow spawn things, will have a think about a build for it today, probably going to need to get Frost Nova back in there and some more AOE, Meteor maybe. I'm still mostly wearing the crit gear that I had for the melee build, but I'm gonna need a lot of gold to be able to buy gear good enough to be worth the upgrade. Gear prices seem to have gone up some since I bought this set, I reckon I need 5-10 million for a set now, and I haven't yet found a way to earn more than about 100k/hour...  :oh_i_see:

For some reason the every single link to a build is not working for me, it just seems to show me the basic selected abilities, not the used runes.

The board's url code truncates everything after the first "!".  If you take a close look you'll see none of those characters are bold-faced like the rest of the link.

:uhrr:
Duh!

Wizard's early game is torture.  I thought the WD was bad, but this is wretched.  Looks like at 19 that I only have to suffer through a couple more crappy levels before I get some better tools.

I started with the wizard.  I didn't think it that bad until I started a monk and then a warrior.

So now that I have some comparison, I can say up until 30 that the Wizard is the most boring I've played yet.  Hell, even my wee level 5 Demon Hunter is more fun.

If you twink your gear, Diamond Skin and Wave of Force are all you really need for any given pack through most of normal.

I did act IV normal pretty much just using archon, diamond skin, and electrocute. Oh look, a boss - hit archon, hold down RMB, collect loot. (Except for big D this is how they all went.)

Is mammoth hydra good? It doesn't seem as good as venom hydra but the description suggests that it should be an upgrade.

I gave Mammoth Hydra a try and it seemed shit. It spews out a line of fire from its static location, so you have to position both it and the mobs so that they stand still in it.

Venom Hydra spits globs of goo at the mobs, wherever they are, so it'll put stuff under them when they're beating on you etc. End result is that with Venom Hydra more mobs stand in multiple stacks of acid goo for longer and take much, much more damage.

So far it boils down to Arcane Hydra for arcane kiting with temporal flux or Venom Hydra for max damage.

I am very afraid of a Venom Hydra nerf actually...

Yep, expecting that any time, plus I would guess a nerf of Diamond Skin any time too.

I am, too. I try and switch to other hydras that on paper seem to be better but that acid bath is just too great. Temporal flux passive works great with my arcane orb, maybe I should try arcane hydra for more stunning action.

I think we need anything but nerfs, I feel like I'm hitting a wall in Act 3 Hell.

This was my impression, it also seems that Mammoth Hydra fires a lot slower than Venom Hydra. Lightning Hydra seems like it could have a nice for single-target DPS, although I can't remember getting a feel for it very well. Arcane Hydra seems fine, Frost Hydra seems broken.

As far as nerfs go, while there is a lot of diversity in builds then general shape of Signature Spell, 2x AP DPS abilities, defensive ability (diamond skin), armour spell and magic weapon seems pretty set in stone. I wouldn't mind some variety there, but I don't see how without breaking the class.

I still find lighting hydra superior for my playstyle to venom.  It has better weapon pass-through (110% vs 80%) attacks faster and if you're a "Run the fuck away" kiter vs. a "circle the wagons" type you're not getting the advantage of the poison globs.    Sure, if I can survive keeping things within melee range of me Venom works better.. but if I drop LH in front of me as I retreat then run past it things are smoother with lightning.

I prefer lightning hydra as well, although I only just GOT venom hydra so it still has time to win me over I guess. I do tend towards the "run the fuck away" school of wizarding though.

I use venom hydra even though I run from everything because mobs will often be stationary for whatever reason. If you take off a chunk of HP large enough they stagger, if they're ranged they're stationary while firing, if they kill you they're stationary (hey in Inferno this is a legitimate point to make), if you have a follower stun them or you have some kind of stun they're stationary.. if you're kiting dudes in a circle they also will run over patches they were in before since those venom patches don't immediately dissipate. If they're huge ass mobs they have more mass to step in puddles. If you have wormhole teleport you can drop a venom hydra and then do four ports in a straight line to disengage entirely and they'll be stationary too.

tl;dr: I LOVE VENOM HYDRA

Venom + any snare = fun times. The pool is surprisingly large and appears to stack in intensity with multiple hits (from my scrolling damage numbers, at least)

I'm dropping blizzard + venom hydra, and it works fairly well.

Slowly edging towards 60 (54 now), wondering if some older wizards here can advice me about gear...

What are you looking for when shopping? I suppose Int, Vitality and All Resistances(?) But in what order?

To give a concrete example, I just bought my most expensive piece of equipment so far:

(http://img809.imageshack.us/img809/9646/armorhq.png)

Good? Bad? Worth the 100k gold I paid?

Wow, I've paid 100k for lots of things and I haven't even reached 60 yet.

It's pretty darn good for that price! Thorns is kind of a wasted slot.

When I look for gear I put in Int>100 Vit>60 and All Res >40 although I might toy with the values depending on the slot I'm shopping for. For specific slots it's nice to have bonus AP or AP on crit on your weapon/offhand/hat, and I think 12% move speed on your boots is almost essential. Belt can have +% life, pants and chest can have lots of sockets, gloves can have attack speed. Rings and amulets are usually way overpriced if they're any good.

I'm toying around with the energy twister rune that keeps the twisters in place. Combined with the arcane snare passive it seems like a viable alternative to blizzard. The twisters do a lot more damage, the only problem is that they are a bit trickier to target and hit a smaller area.

Lightning Hydra seems to be working well too.

There's no vitality on that chest piece, so my personal valuation of that item is it's worth what it can be vendored for.

needs.more.gold.find.

Further thoughts on some abilities I have been trying out:

 - Spectral Blades with the rune that extends the range to 20yards is fun, since it does a ton of damage, but you're still obliged to stick way too close to targets for comfort in higher difficulty levels.
 - Lightning Hydra is a really solid option and it has a very long range, comfortably the width of the screen.
 - Familiar just feels inferior to magic weapon. Even though it attacks every time you do, and for more damage, as far as I can tell you don't make up the benefit of the mobility magic weapon affords by boosting spells like hydra, blizzard and meteor. None of the runes seemed to make this anything other than a novelty. If you had a tank and could afford to sit and shoot this might work, but otherwise, avoid.
 - Mirror Image is NOT an adequate substitute for Diamond Skin
 - The shock armour rune that adds runspeed when you get hit seems really good. Against swarmy mobs it has almost 100% uptime, and an extra 25% move speed seems really good. I had been using Energy Armour (Pinpoint Armour) for added survivability and crit, but this seems to work just as well, and aids kiting. I don't know if the shock damage makes much difference, it isn't noticeable as far as I can tell. But the runspeed buff is sweet.
 - The lifedrain rune for magic weapon is useless.

In other news, finding Hell Act II comfortable enough with 140% gold find. 12.5K DPS and 25K HP helps though.

Mirror Image is still pretty useful though as it's a CC break.

I was playing around with this build (http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#aiXOPQ!dfU!cZZYZY) yesterday in Hell when I really didn't feel like kiting a whole lot.  I just can't get down with the whole Blizzard/Venom Hydra/blind-fire Orb spells style of play so I haven't made a big push on my Wizard, but I keep coming back to it.

And yes, Magic Weapon w/ Blood Magic is garbage.

Familiar totally had a use when I cheesed killed Rakanoth in inferno using this strategy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vpiBGihsBo ..total gimmick though. Magic Weapon+an Armor is pretty much the baseline for any respectable wizard build.

That's pretty cheesy

You can get a rune on familiar that gives it a passive dmg boost which stacks with magic weapon, it's very sexy.

Here's my current build. Level 45. Just started Act III NM.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#UiRhXT!bXf!aZbabY (http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#UiRhXT!bXf!aZbabY)

I just switched from arcane to venom hydra. I like it well enough. It's certainly cool to see my enemies dissolve in the puddles.
I also just recently put that Armor spell in there. Galvanizing Ward makes the armors seem a lot more worthwhile.

Self-learnt pro tip: I am a lot less squishy in general when liberally applying Diamond Skin.
What rune do the pros use? I've been toying with Mirror Skin lately, and I see DS wear off before it gets burned through most of the time.

I must confess that I died once to NM Belial, but that was a failure of tactics rather than defense. IOW, I stood in the fire.

Well, I am certainly no pro, but I found the Prism rune (casting cost reduction) to be most useful and since Hell difficulty Crystal Shell for that extra bit of protection.

Problem with Sparkflint is that is increases overall DPS by 12%, while Force Weapon increases *weapon* DPS by 15%, which is in turn multiplied with Intelligence, resulting in a much greater increase (about 10K in my case) Sparkflint is an increase, yeah, but I'm not sure that 4K DPS (again, my case) is worth it, when you could have some survivability in that slot instead (or Venom Hydra, which will result in more damage than Sparkflint.)

If you only count the % damage increase, sure, but remember that sparkflint still shoots its own attacks at 20% weapon damage a pop, so you have to take that into account as well when making the comparison.

True, but since wizards spend most of the time kiting (well, I do anyway), damage added to passives (lingering effects, hydras et c.) is more valuable than directed damage. I'm not saying it's useless, just that Force Weapon (even Magic Weapon un-runed) is consistently better than Sparkflint and I think there are better options than having two active DPS-boosters. I guess the question is, what are you trading away to get Sparkflint? Survivability has an effective cap (you don't need more than live) so if you're already there, sure, it's a decent choice.

It is also easier to notice when familiar has worn off.  :why_so_serious:

But yeah, running both seems like overkill. I don't really find myself having space for both.

I only run both for hilarious gimmick builds. Like my "Oh wait, belial just stands there so I can roll him with Energy Twisters" joke build <3

I made a video!

This is my level 50 wizard versus NM Azmodan. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZcNMFUeJWg)

It's a simple fight.
1) Poison Hydra
2) Kite

My wizard is at 50k hit points, 400+ resistances in total, and is trying to reach 60k dps while preferencing Resist All (the absolute best stat to have alongside +int) — I guess so very few people are succesfully infernoing, and I'm lucky to be with a group that's aces at it and we stomp through Butcher runs, march briskly enough through Kulle runs, gingerly pace forward with act 3 siege runs, and desperately poke at Act 4 Herald of Diablo mini-runs.

I've abandoned any pretense of defensive gearing once I've reached a certain point. I'm at 500 resists and 30k health and I find that to be enough that nothing one shots me through force armor (nothing unavoidable, anyway). I've been way too afraid to do any public inferno runs, that just seems like a recipe for frustration.

I've also learned something about our group: We hate kiting. They play me like a quarterback, make a little bubble of safety from which I have just enough time to hurl out my entire pool of arcane energy in blizzard/disintegrate.

OK. I decided to keep track of some stats as I ran my wizard solo through Act 1 Hell. It was tedious, so I won't do it again, but here are the stats.

Parameters: I cleared out each map.
I fled from one elite pack, since they were kicking my ass very quickly, and I wasn't even making a dent in them. Aside from that, I killed everything I saw.
I picked up and sold white loot.
Incidentally, of the blue and yellow loot that I found, I didn't find anything that was an upgrade, or that looked like good AH bait, so I vendored all of that too.

Net gold: 243519.
Repairs: 8110.
Deaths (approximate, based on discrete repair costs): 18.
Radiant Gems: 33
Square Gems: 9
Perfect Square Gems: 3
Jewelcrafting Tomes: 43
Blacksmithing Tomes: 38

So been grinding act 1 and occasionally act 2 inferno for a few weeks now, I am at the point where I want to progress more.  What kind of build will get me farthest and what minimum stats should I be shooting for to get into ACT 3 and beyond solo?

Currently I am at almost 25k dps, 55k health, 2.8k armor, 350+ resist all, thinking I need to trade in some of my MF (117%) for resistance? 

I am trying out a fairly defensive set of passive skills (Blur, Galvanizing Ward & Temporal Flux) and energy armor boosts my resists all up over 550 and 4.6k armor.  Any suggestions on what to shoot for stat wise or more survivable builds?

55k sounds like too much hp, I think you need more dps but I'm not sure I can help you so much since I usually run with others and a solo build Wizard is very different to one with meat shields.

My general play Wizard is:

Magic Weapon - Knockback
Teleport - Mirror images
Hydra - Poison
Energy Armour - Hp life thingy

Glass Cannon
Cold Blooded
Extra Arcane power and regen one

Blizzard - reduced arcane cost - Primary Left mouse
Disintegrate - Autotracking - Secondary Right mouse

I could probably change passives and move disintegrate out but it feels strange to have a Wizard without Disintegrate

I'm 28k-30k hp
350-400ish resist

Sorry if it's been mentioned already. Has anyone tried out a critical mass build lately? I've been having some fun with it. Really nice to not have to kite stuff.

I did it initially with a helm of command and a shield; I ditched the shield and helm for a source and wizard hat with AP on crit. More damage, fewer deaths. Some elite combos can still be pretty brutal though.

I've been trying a critical mass build, but I think I need more crit.   :oh_i_see:

It sort of works, but only in Act 1 Inferno.  I think I need a much sturdier build for Act 2.

You'll notice the difference once you get over 30ish crit. You need crit on items that can have it - source, helm, gloves, bracers. I elected for +crit damage rings and an emerald in my weapon, as getting rings with both crit chance and crit damage are either impossible to find or impossibly expensive on the GAH. You'll also need some combiniaton of life on hit and life regen. Around 1k regen with marginal/no LoH makes Act II doable (not necessarily farm-able though)  assuming you can get resists (buffed) to 600+.

I was able to pick up a pair of rings with crit chance and life on hit. that along with a gem in my weapon gave me about 1000 LoH for pretty cheap. Sittin at about 25k dps, 20k hp, 45% crit, 1000 loh, around 4000 armor and 500 resists. Can farm act2 usually but there are still times where I'll get a nasty elite combo that rocks my world.

I hit 90k dps with my regular gear and was still having to kite so figured I'd try something new.

Hmm maybe I'll try to build some LoH, currently I can farm the early part of Act II but still having issues putting oasis and beyond into farm status.  35k dps/57k health.  I recently have have my buffed resists in the 700+ range but haven't moved back to act 2 yet to try that out.

Really not sure I want to do the whole MF gear swapping dance, been kinda waiting for a blizz patch on that but I suppose if I do then the prices on Act 2 gear will drop as well.

You can run a crit mass build with pretty much nothing for dps.  I cleared all of inferno at about 16k dps.  No matter what you'll get the crappy elites that will kick your ass.  I run at 30% crit, and about 400ish resist all, and about 1000LoH.  I agree LoH is huge, since you will get hit, but with huge groups of mobs, the healing way outpaces the damage in between stunlocking them.  Only things I really struggle with are the fast/runaway types, since you can't keep them grouped up.

I've messed with tons of variations, but my favorite is;

Spectral Blades / Deep Cuts
Twister / Wicked Wind
Diamond Skin / Crystal Shell
Frost Nova / Deep Freeze
Explosive Blast / Chain Reaction

Blur
Evocation
Critical Mass

You can swap out Spectral Blades for Energy Armor / Prismatic if you need to bump resists up, lot more efficient than trying to gear up to 800-900 resall.

I don't think there is ever a point where farming anything but act1 is actually efficient.  Warriors Rest nets me almost a rare/minute, it's boring, but I don't die, and I can watch tv while I'm running it.  And at that pace, it's way better than anything even with 5 NV stacks.  I'm sure it's going to get wacked with the next wave of "game limit restrictions", but for now, I'm using it as much as I can.

Ok, New Question :


How do you play a wizard ? 

You do the opposite from playing a barb.

Archon Wizard is probably the easiest way to play.  Play on a low to mid MP depending on your gear and you kill fast enough to keep Archon up forever.

You can also play CM, which is more powerful but requires better gear generally speaking.

Funny this thread comes back just as I fired up the game again and thought, you know... a wizard might be fun to try.  :awesome_for_real:

Except, you don't really.  Since you can't really control them and end up toe to toe anyway.  The Witch Doctor works for that, but I can't get the hang of the wizard at all and I'm BORED with him again because I have no idea how he's 'supposed' to play. 

Also, a wizard isn't fun to try.  I'm having fun with Monk, Barb and WD.  Wizard is down at the bottom for fun.  Hell, even trying to figure out WTF the Demon Hunter is all about is more fun than this shit. 

(Though dropping a meteor on people is fun until you run outta mana.)

Here is my wizard gear and build.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Longshot-1489/hero/1624432 (http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Longshot-1489/hero/1624432)

I know that I could use some gear improvements, but better pieces require either hundreds of millions of gold and or weeks constantly refreshing the AH to find gear that some sucker under priced.

Almost all those skills are 'Oh Noes, they're on me.'

This is what I'm talking about.  I'd rather play a different class if it's just hitting them with arcane up close.

Less "oh noes, they're on me" and more teleport into a big group and assplode everything.

Do you use macros or is your left hand super painful right now?

That was my complaint about CM, had to smash 1-2-3 ever .5s.

When I was playing Wizard the game play was "drop a hydra, run the fuck around it until it killed things or Archon was up.  Then ARCANE SMASH.

I'm probably doing it wrong, but I would hydra/blizzard/disintegrate.  I think my main attack is chain lightning.  I hear that poison hydra is no longer the best one.

I never understood the love of poison hydra. I found lightning hydra much better because while poison had better dps, you had to get them to stand in those clouds, which meant standing still yourself.

You can find some pretty in-depth guides on the CM/WW (Critical Mass/Wicked Wind) Wizard build if you google it.

Though, as MrHat points out, you have to furiously mash buttons when you use it. I don't mind, but I can see how it would be annoying.

No no, if you're toe to toe you die. That's why instead of running to mob and smashing, you run away run away run away.

Running and kiting isn't fun.

It just isn't.

You're a wimpy little mage, what else would you do?

(I'd say that maybe the class isn't for you, but then you're still playing a game you seem to hate, so... keep at it and wallow in the misery!)

 :why_so_serious:

for the Mage, I would have expected a lot more 'keep 'em at bay and hit 'em at range' than therre is.  I was just wondering if I was missing something.

I love the Witch Doctor, so I suspect that's the casting class for me.  But I've hit 60 with nice gear, so turning my attentions to those I haven't levelled yet.

So you don't like the Wiz being up close, and you don't want to kite to keep them at distance? Okay then...:headscratch: 

Really, there are plenty of tools to keep distance. Blizzard, Wave of Force, Ray of Frost, Ice Nova, Slow Time, and Ice Armor there are plenty of tools to keep enemies away, but yes movement is required :why_so_serious:

I'm with Lant, this isn't the class for you.

You'll want to slow their movement, not necessarily stand still yourself.  So blizzard.

Actually, what I was after was kinda the information you just provided.

 :oh_i_see:

This isn't the class you're looking for <handwave>

Well, no probably not.

But I've done 3 of them and the Demon Hunter fucks with my head worse.

IIRC They're also movement, just erratic, crazy-pants movement rather than a steady retreat.

If what's selling on the AH is any indication, they are also wildly unpopular.

I haven't played a DH in a while but yeah, if you don't like kiting (and not just kiting, but being a spaz about it), the DH is not a good time.

My wizard method is actually similar to my DH method, except the wizard has better "aw fuck" buttons.

Also I suck.  :why_so_serious:

I main a DH and almost no one kites with DH anymore.  Just Shadow Power + Gloom and maybe a guardian turret if you are worried about damage still, then stand there and do damage until your hatred runs out.  Since the buff to Rapid Fire (Bombardment) and the way Shadow Power snapshots onto Rapid Fire, you can just pop Shadow Power, hit Rapid Fire and keep it going until you run out of hatred - you'll life steal through pretty much anything.  The only time you really need to vault is to break CC  if you get jailed inside desecration or something.

Here (http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#URXmOS!bfg!YZacca) is the Wiz build I was using when I last played. Slightly unconventional, but I liked it, and was doing MP3 fairly easily with mediocre gear (http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Apocrypha-2851/hero/20211433) with it. The Diamond Skin along with Critical Mass and some crit gear meant that I rarely needed to run away.

If they released some new content I'd probably come back and play again for a bit, and I mean real content not stuff like the mechanical marvel or whatever it was called.

CM/WW (Critical Mass/Wicked Wind): http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#VgXYhT!WgZ!YZcccc (http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#VgXYhT!WgZ!YZcccc)

Video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dyPiv7dTns)
 
There isn't really any kiting involved. Just run up to the mobs and blow them up. It's what I use on my Wizard.

Holy shit, that's rather gigglesome.

Oh look, Germans being ruthlessly efficient.   :why_so_serious:

A Wizard with Scorn.  Sure, the DPS system in this game isn't retarded.

:facepalm:

Thank you.  That's satisfying an itch.

Quick Question :  In that video, the wizard appears to be throwing out groups of 3 pulsey blasty things.  I have looked over the skills and I can't see how/what is actually doing this.  Any ideas ?


Edited to add :  Never mind, I'm a fucking idiot.  I didn't notice that's not an NPC following him, it's a fucking Monk using that aura that throws out throwy blasty things.

lol.