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That's interesting, so if you used the boosted damage rune for archon, and then stacked dynamo on top of that you would have 400% disintigrate beams or whatever it is. That's crazy high.

I've been using Archon to farm ACT I as well and its fun. There are even some rare mobs that I can straight tank in it as well. It's super fast.

The only issue I run into is when I get a really long duration stacked up, and then run into an elite pack that I need my standard build to deal with properly, like reflects damage or something. But in ACT I at least I've found Archon to be a quick and easy solution to invulnerable minions packs, of course if you went venom blizzard build then they are pretty easy now anyway.

I do have screen shots of the difference. I just don't have an account on any of picture sharing sites, and have been a bit lazy about it. But it's been like this for a while now, even changed up some gear and drastically increased some stats. Anyone know a good site for screen shots, I heard that imgur leaves all the pictures a bit blurry and hard to read.

Yes, I did call it the wrong thing in the title my mistake, I am indeed talking about the Familiar.

I'm a bit stumped by this whole thing because you are all right, MW should pull ahead, but for a while now, familiar has been ~300 DPS more damage. Very small amount for sure, but still, a bit curious.

Tomorrow I'll try and get those screen shots posted.

Well, they said that they are planning on making pets scale with vitality as well whenever they get around to the next patch, so I see them becoming a bit better after that, and everyone will be going back to their WD.

I had put mine on the shelf for my wizard when I hit inferno as well, but now that I have a monk friend in good enough gear, we are farming ACT II with little issues. The biggest thing is that we get to do a great deal of damage if we have a tank, but if we have to kite, we juust can't get the damage in to kill stuff fast enough.

That makes sense. Like I said its a very marginal difference. But I think what's happening is it is adding the familiars dps into your own and thats what is making the difference, but I'm not sure about that. The difference is so small though it really doesn't matter.

I did notice though the when I don't have my follower with me, I get more DPS out of MW.

Yes, I'm using the right rune for MW.

I'm using the scoundrel for the crit.

Well, I have only just started stacking crit chance and haven't even started crit damage. And I'm wishing that I had all along. It becomes really hard to change your gear setup when you already have decent enough gear.

At the moment I'm trying to replace my single element resistances with resist all, but at the same time increase crit chance and damage, as well as maintain my life, and it's proving to be impossible to do for as cheaply as I got this far.

I would highly suggest just getting some crit chance and crit damage gear now, as it's super expensive and will only get worse. The thing is that IAS is still a great stat, and even more in demand now because people lost so much. I had a set of gloves that I replaced with a bit less IAS but some crit chance, and sold the ones I had that were 9% IAS for 1.5 million, and I had bought them for only 150k a few weeks ago, people really want that IAS even though crit is much closer now in terms of value per point then it used to be.

It's possible though I think to do it without crit and crit damage, the issue is that the people with the really high damage amounts got there with crit chance and damage. you'll eventually hit a wall where you can't really get any higher without getting some. And it seems the prices get higher and higher every day. I've heard it is possible to do the whole game with 30k DPS. But I'm not so sure, I have just over 32 and I seemed a bit weak when I stepped into ACT III of inferno today.

Yeah, I would probably go for the crit damage but I'm currently addicted to crit on my characters, so that could be a bit bias. My attack speed isn't great, but I noticed a huge improvement just getting a bit more crit damage then I had before.

So I just finished ACT II in inferno and after stepping into ACT III I quickly realized I wasn't ready.

But more importantly I saw how useless Diamondskin is.

So deciding to replace it I went and put Magic weapon in with the extra damage. But it didn't boost my damage all that much so I was looking at other options.

Even though it is a lower percentage I threw companion on there. And it raised my DPS more then Magic Weapon did.

With MW it was 35785, with Companion it was 35965.

Anyone have a clue as to why this would happen. At first I just thought that I was tired, but after tripple checking decided I would ask here. I can probably test this out a bit tomorrow while I farm ACT II, but I'm not so geared that I can stare at my numbers yet to really pay enough attention to it.

If it's not bugged, and it really is more of an increase, is it just a trick of the numbers and MW gives more actual DPS. I'm thinking sort of how IAS gives you higher numbers but doesn't always actually mean higher DPS. In the end its not much so the knockback from MW is still probably a better utility then companion is.

As a side note has anyone messed around with the one that absorbs 1 hit every six seconds. Seemed like it could be a life saver when combined with force armor.

I was using a 2h staff for a while because I was able to get a 1k+ damage one from the AH super cheap at one point. I was stacking AS and had gotten up to 1.61 attacks per second, and it was amazing because it was fast enough to not feel sluggish. I liked it beause a 2h weapon has more consistent damage per hit. If you look at the damage range, there is less of a gap between the min damage and the max damage which I really liked, and it works really well with a crit set up on the rest of your gear.

But in terms of theoretical DPS it really is pretty even. your damage is listed as per second. This just means that the only time you will really see a difference is while kiting. Which in Inferno is all the time. With the faster one hander you may be able to get off a few more attacks while stopped. Or get out that hydra or blizzard faster and keep moving.

As far as I know the only real reason to go with a 2h at the moment is if you are using channeled abilities as it drains your AP much slower and lets you sustain your damage for longer. But I haven't seen too many people progressing with a channel build that aren't over geared.

So I'm about to move into ACT II with my WD after benching him for a while. But now that I have a solid tank to stand behind, I'm in love once more.

I'm wondering though if Acid Cloud is still a good choice in ACT II as stuff is more spread out and it seems like it only does a good amount of damage to white mobs.

Is there something that I could get more damage out of? I don't like Soul Harvest because of the risk. I don't have amazing DPS or anything, but I think I have enough to at least do Maghda runs instead of Butcher runs haha. I'm at ~32k, again without soul harvest.

I do use the rune that increases the radius of the cloud as it worked the best before. Before release I thought I would like Corpse bomb or whatever its called, but found the slow animation to my disliking. The only thing that I've liked as much was Locust Swarm, but it has the same risk as Soul Harvest, and I wonder if it's damage is enough.

Mostly I just want the Aoe to quickly clear out the larger groups of white mobs as I'll be focusing down one champion/elite at a time other wise.

I was really happy with my AS before the nerf. I was sitting at 1.9 and it seemed perfect. But after the nerfs, I'm not so sure anymore. I'm now at 1.6, and it still seems plenty fast. But I decided to get a bit of crit chance gear to test out, and I noticed that which I only added about 2k damage with it, the damage is more consistent now, and its a great deal faster to kill stuff.

I'm playing with a Monk tank and it's going pretty awesome and we're going to try out ACT II tomorrow. But I'm only at 17.5% crit and it seemed really worth the cost of the items and health that I lost replacing the few pieces that I replaced. So I'm going to continue getting some more. I'm thinking 30% will be perfect for a PD build. That means that most of the time (RNG is still RNG) at least one of the darts will crit, and that will be good enough.

I wish I could afford a weapon with a socket, but I just got a 800+ DPS ceremonial dagger with great stats on it, and hardly ever see one with much more damage, so until I can spend the gold on either a normal dagger, or find one in game, I'll have to do with out.

I do miss my LoH on my old weapon though, reflects damage is much harder to deal with for me now.

So I just hopped on the Blizzard/Hydra band wagon after getting sick of temporal flux and arcane orb not working well enough, and am very happy with it, but I have a few questions on a posisble build I was thinking about.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#clORQX!YXW!YYYbZa

I'm wondering if I get around 20 AP on crit, and around 30% crit chance will the crits from arcane orb allow me to use it as my filler spell? I'm still working on getting the gear together its just realy expensive, with the IAS nerf I dont' want to loose what I have anymore and crit% and crit damage with int and all resists on items is pretty much impossible to afford but is what I need to make improvements as well.

I just feel like I needed a bit more burst damage at times. (Have 31k with glass cannon.)

Next I'm wondering about Force Armor. When I first hit 60 I used the resistances one instead, but when I switched it out for the butcher I noticed that it was working quite well. But my resistances are kinda low at the moment, and Im wonering if the boost it would give me would be more beneficial then the reduction in damage since you pretty much have to avoid everything anyway.

My health is a bit low now as well because I just 2k buying some gloves so I'm using Diamond skin mostly for reflects damage, but I keep hearing that it is pretty useless after ACT I outside of protection from reflects damage, I've thought about what I would replace it with, and I'm thinking I may go mirror image instead of magic weapon, but I'm not sure if the DPS will be of more value then the defensive value of mirror.

I used to use Reversal in teleport as well because I found it to be more useful then teleporting a bunch of times, but because of the weak slow of temporal flux changed to wormhole. But since if you kite back over the pools of poison, I'm thinking that Reversal is the way to go again because you teleport away kite them for a bit then TP back to where you were getting max damage out of your hydra. Am I wrong about this?

Anyway, a bit long, but any suggestions would be welcome. I feel like I have the skill now to dodge enough attacks and such, but want to make sure that my build and gear are in order before I risk all that gold on repairs.

Interesting stuff.

I already have a standard wizard in Inferno, so this new wizard won't be a main focus, but this certainly sounds like a fun side project to keep an eye out for gear.

It's just a really fun play style, and it was so surprising to see some of the damage that I was doing. I definitely see what you mean about 18k being more than a standard wizard having 18k. I'm not in Inferno on my melee wizard, hell I'm not even in NM yet, but I often felt like I was doing way more damage then the rest of my group was even with lower damage values.

I am a little lost on this meteor thing though. Why is it necessary, is it for the AP return? Or for the LoH? I want to try and find a way to use only melee attacks. Something a bit closer to this, which is pretty close to one posted by someone on the first page I think:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#WZYXOh!fga!aYZacZ

That's pretty close to the build I'm using now. I would probably change to force armor after I got enough resistances to not need the boost. But anyway, why is the Meteor that important?

And what do you guys think of Arcane Orbit? It's what I'm using right now, kind of due to lack of options at my low level, the only thing I don't really like about it thouhg is the slow animation for activating it.

Last they said about it, they are leaning towards lowering the amount of IAS that is found on gear. And that likely won't affect the gear that you already have, just the gear that drops in the future. So nothing is really going to change for people who already have quite a bit of IAS. The real issue is that for people gearing up still, or for those who want to increase other stats on their gear that has the IAS, it's going to be really hard to find upgrades because IAS has a huge effect on your DPS. Of course it all kind of depends on your play style as well, if you don't have the time to take advantage of that attack speed it's just bloating your DPS on your character sheet anyway, and really only helping you for the first attacks of an engagement.

If they do end up going with changing the equations to add in DR, it will be even less of a change. If your around 2 attacks per second, you probably won't see much of a drop. But people closer to 2.5 or maybe not even until your close to 3 will see a decent drop most likely. But they said that they don't like hidden modifiers like this that much so it probaby won't happen.

Your resistances are probably just fine. IDK what the DPS of your weapon is, but that is probably your issues. That and even with a better weapon your INT is kinda low. I have way less resistances then you though and smash face through ACT I. You just need more damage.