Ray of Frost - Black Ice (frost; good CC; Black Ice quickly takes out groups)
Hydra - Mammoth Hydra (fire)
Black Hole - Absolute Zero (CC and variable frost damage buff) Storm Armor - Scramble (mobility)
Magic Weapon - Electrify (lightning; also relevant to resource generation since I have 4 APoC)
Teleport - Wormhole (mobility; John Crichton)
I'm currently running http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#iZNTSQ!YWRb!cbZYaZ and solo farming T3, but for max dps in place of mobility, I can/do run http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#iZNOSj!YWeR!cbZZac. My solo speed farming build sacrifices arcane damage meteor procs and EE damage, as well as a decent amount of crit (5% from Energy Armor - PPB and 6% from Conflagration) for Storm Armor - Scramble and Teleport/evocation mobility. At T3, white mobs melt fast enough that the trade is a good one.
The pure dps variant looks like this:
Ray of Frost - Black Ice (frost; good CC; Black Ice quickly takes out groups)
Hydra - Mammoth Hydra (fire) / Arcane Hydra (arcane)
Black Hole - Absolute Zero (CC and variable frost damage buff)
Energy Armor - Pinpoint Barrier (dps/survivability)
Magic Weapon - Electrify (lightning; also relevant to resource generation since I have 4 APoC)
Familiar - Cannoneer (arcane) / Sparkflint (fire)
I would only consider the Arcane Hydra/Sparkflint combo (as opposed to Mammoth Hydra/Cannoneer) if I can back it up with Stormcrow for the additional fire proc to place Conflagration and EEx4 on most stuff; even then, am not sure it will be net damage-competitive.
Key Items
-Light of Grace (pass-through RoF)
-Azurewrath (freeze, cold bonus)
-RoRG (for reasons)
-Tal's chest, hat, belt (for similar reasons)
Just Cause Items
-Firebird shoulders, pants, boots (decent gear and adds survivability 4pc)
-Custerian Wristguards (probably switching to Strongarm)
-Rakoff's Glass of Life (good regen source; might swap to Ess of Johan until I get Tal's ammy)
I would really like to be running Frostburn, Thunderfury, Tal's ammy, and Stormcrow. At the moment, I am intently trying to farm Frostburn, following which I will really want to swap my Azurewrath for a Thunderfury (I think), and when I can get a Tal's ammy, I can swap my Tal's helm for a Stormcrow. The freeze from Azurewrath is part of what makes this work so well; my main damage source is substantially AoE and allows significant CC, even before Black Hole gets involved. I want to compare proc rate/duration and net freeze up-time from Frostburn before deciding to really swap Azurewrath out; it is plausible to me that both together is a good choice. For T6-ish content, I may be interested in using Frostburn/Rimeheart rather than Frostburn/Thunderfury when I have all these available. Eventually a frost Stone of Jordan would be nice as well. I will probably swap bracers tomorrow with Strongarm Bracers; I didn't realize before that Black Hole counted as "knock back."
Other future considerations I have are Serpent Sparkler (if I can get one) and Tasker and Theo, but I'm not sure of the relative value of either, esp since they synergize together, but would cost me both potential freeze generators if used in conjunction.
While it's a nice idea to color items and spells based on their element type, it's quite difficult to read the text due to the colors.
As for the build: I believe that you're trying to hard to get all the elements which actually reduces your dps. Your choice of magic weapon and lack of sparkflint costs you a massive 20% damage (ok the lightning proc deals a bit but not that much).
You would probably be better of playing a full frost build without EE or tal rasha's. This lets you stack +% frost damage and gives ALL your spells a huge damage boost from blackhole.
As for passives:
- Glass cannon really isn't viable for anything beside farming stuff you could clear anyway.
- Evocation isn't worthwhile for anything beside Archon or Explosive Blast builds. If you need the extra mobility I'd advise Illusionist. It's an amazing passive which makes you near immortal.
Also, I'd say that if you can afford it, replace Azurewarth with Utar's roar (still up to +20% cold damage, but slower attack speed and thus longer channeling time) and your gloves with Frostburns (technically, they provide more control than Azurewrath, while also allowing you to have 2 secondaries on weapon at the cost of one on gloves).
The end result (hardcore variation) will be something like this. Currently using arcane hydra + sparkflint familiar.
Channeling time of Ray of Frost is infinite in battle for me. Probably can get quite close to that even if I ditch power of storm for prismatic armor, but haven't quite tested that yet.
I've done a build with frostburn's, azure wrath, light of grace. I go ray of frost black ice rune, use blizzard, and everything else I use is cold. It's fun but not too viable above T3-T4. Maybe with rimeheart and some top gear you could do T6. I try to use absolute all cold skills, but as limdul stated, you lose out on a lot of DPS from magic weapon, sparkflint. Hopefully cold and lightning will get some love in 2.1, here is my skills http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#ZlNfSm!WgRX!bZZcZY
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http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/JeanLucPicrd-1737/hero/5685204
Ray of Frost - Black Ice (frost; good CC; Black Ice quickly takes out groups)
Hydra - Mammoth Hydra (fire)
Black Hole - Absolute Zero (CC and variable frost damage buff)
Storm Armor - Scramble (mobility)
Magic Weapon - Electrify (lightning; also relevant to resource generation since I have 4 APoC)
Teleport - Wormhole (mobility; John Crichton)
Glass Cannon (dps)
Cold Blooded (dps)
Elemental Exposure (x3; dps * * *)
Evocation (mobility; extra BHs)
I'm currently running http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#iZNTSQ!YWRb!cbZYaZ and solo farming T3, but for max dps in place of mobility, I can/do run http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#iZNOSj!YWeR!cbZZac. My solo speed farming build sacrifices arcane damage meteor procs and EE damage, as well as a decent amount of crit (5% from Energy Armor - PPB and 6% from Conflagration) for Storm Armor - Scramble and Teleport/evocation mobility. At T3, white mobs melt fast enough that the trade is a good one.
The pure dps variant looks like this:
Ray of Frost - Black Ice (frost; good CC; Black Ice quickly takes out groups)
Hydra - Mammoth Hydra (fire) / Arcane Hydra (arcane)
Black Hole - Absolute Zero (CC and variable frost damage buff)
Energy Armor - Pinpoint Barrier (dps/survivability)
Magic Weapon - Electrify (lightning; also relevant to resource generation since I have 4 APoC)
Familiar - Cannoneer (arcane) / Sparkflint (fire)
Glass Cannon (dps)
Cold Blooded (dps)
Conflagration (dps)
Elemental Exposure (x4; dps * * * *)
I would only consider the Arcane Hydra/Sparkflint combo (as opposed to Mammoth Hydra/Cannoneer) if I can back it up with Stormcrow for the additional fire proc to place Conflagration and EEx4 on most stuff; even then, am not sure it will be net damage-competitive.
Key Items
-Light of Grace (pass-through RoF)
-Azurewrath (freeze, cold bonus)
-RoRG (for reasons)
-Tal's chest, hat, belt (for similar reasons)
Just Cause Items
-Firebird shoulders, pants, boots (decent gear and adds survivability 4pc)
-Custerian Wristguards (probably switching to Strongarm)
-Rakoff's Glass of Life (good regen source; might swap to Ess of Johan until I get Tal's ammy)
I would really like to be running Frostburn, Thunderfury, Tal's ammy, and Stormcrow. At the moment, I am intently trying to farm Frostburn, following which I will really want to swap my Azurewrath for a Thunderfury (I think), and when I can get a Tal's ammy, I can swap my Tal's helm for a Stormcrow. The freeze from Azurewrath is part of what makes this work so well; my main damage source is substantially AoE and allows significant CC, even before Black Hole gets involved. I want to compare proc rate/duration and net freeze up-time from Frostburn before deciding to really swap Azurewrath out; it is plausible to me that both together is a good choice. For T6-ish content, I may be interested in using Frostburn/Rimeheart rather than Frostburn/Thunderfury when I have all these available. Eventually a frost Stone of Jordan would be nice as well. I will probably swap bracers tomorrow with Strongarm Bracers; I didn't realize before that Black Hole counted as "knock back."
Other future considerations I have are Serpent Sparkler (if I can get one) and Tasker and Theo, but I'm not sure of the relative value of either, esp since they synergize together, but would cost me both potential freeze generators if used in conjunction.
Comment, and especially suggestions are welcome.
As for the build: I believe that you're trying to hard to get all the elements which actually reduces your dps. Your choice of magic weapon and lack of sparkflint costs you a massive 20% damage (ok the lightning proc deals a bit but not that much).
You would probably be better of playing a full frost build without EE or tal rasha's. This lets you stack +% frost damage and gives ALL your spells a huge damage boost from blackhole.
As for passives:
- Glass cannon really isn't viable for anything beside farming stuff you could clear anyway.
- Evocation isn't worthwhile for anything beside Archon or Explosive Blast builds. If you need the extra mobility I'd advise Illusionist. It's an amazing passive which makes you near immortal.
The end result (hardcore variation) will be something like this. Currently using arcane hydra + sparkflint familiar.
Channeling time of Ray of Frost is infinite in battle for me. Probably can get quite close to that even if I ditch power of storm for prismatic armor, but haven't quite tested that yet.