They said feedback has changed since Beta.... there's an obvious reason for this. In beta, you have a more intelligent population, aware of game mechanics and balancing for long-term playability. In the current population, let's just say the bar is lowered.
There's also another reasons, of course. People like using the skills available, and with the way NV works currently, you build around a skill set that is a "jack of all trades", which leaves speciality skills unused, regardless of how powerful they are, solely because they don't perform well in as many situations as other skills. Instead of building around certain affix's or boss encounters, you build around what works best for everything, and that pigeon-holes build diversity across the board. There are a great number of skills I'd love to play around with on certain affix's and bosses, but I'll never touch because they are useless past that and they kill my farming having them on the bars.
Or we can go with the low IQ part. I'm sure that's it. /sarcasm
I started shedding my CMWW gear before 1.04 in favor of Arcane Orb/Hydra Archon build. Once you hit 50k HP/DPS, you just melt things so quickly you get impatient waiting out for WW/CM to refresh. I'm killing things faster than I could round up and get a nova lockdown started.
(adding an internal cooldown may have been a more elegant solution, but clearly Blizzard doesn't want to go that way)
Agree 100%.
Also just to clarify on the other spells used thing, I meant that Wizards almost always use those spells WITH Energy Twister, so if Energy Twister didn't proc Legendaries it wouldn't be such a great deal. It would do its job on its own, and you would still proc Legendaries with your other damaging attacks. Your Legendary proc rate will possibly be lower than other classes, yes... but your base build is OP in itself. Sounds fair?
I don't agree with putting an ICD on CM being more elegant. WW is the sole outlier with CM due to it's incredible hit rate, and this change will put it pretty much on par with the rest of a melee wizard's available toolkit.
Okay then, I was wrong about Critical Mass being unaffected. Thank you for the explanation. This just makes it worse though. To literally half LoH and Critical Mass because of Legendaries, when they claim that otherwise they wouldn't have made the change is just absurd.
Also, I just went in and tried both acts 3 and 4 without any life on hit, as some people are claiming that you don't need it. Well.. I can safely tell you that either:
1. You need it.
or
2. I really suck.
or
3. Those guys clearing Inferno on this build without LoH are Diablo Gods.
...or maybe 2 and 3 combined. I don't know. I just don't see going into act 4 with 0 LoH and relying on orbs to heal yourself to be viable.
I do it with Life regen per second. LoH wands became too expensive when I started my CM set, but LPS was still cheap. My breaks between diamond skins are generally less than a second though, and almost always due to a double sentry. I might lose half to 3/4 of my health there, and then have that time for the sentries to swing all the way around again to recover. You don't need a lot for that.
CM is fine. It's slightly less effective against one enemy, unchanged against many. WW was proccing far more than any other ability, it was painfully obvious. Now it's brought in line with others. Hasn't changed the fact that CMWW is still very powerful.
If you do X% of a a creatures life in one hit, it stuns them. All that has happened is you've moved down in either DPS, or Crit Damage so that you're not hitting as hard consistently to cause them to stun lock.
I use this strategy with my DH all the time, and Kieble is probably right, most likely something about your gear is different.
They did up the amount of damage required to stutter champs and elites a couple weeks ago after one of their patches dropped it too low. If you're at the same damage as before that may also be the issue.
I built a MF set into my gear and managed to get halfway decent stats:
26K Health
24K DPS
550 average resists all range from 500-600
25.5% crit chance
550 life per second
786 LoH
19 AP return on crit
325 MF with 5 stacks
I feel I should be able to do Act 2 easily with those stats but Im having trouble. Might have to do with Electrified mobs being bugged all to hell because they eat through 2 Diamond skins and 26k health in around 5 seconds and thats with 650 lightening resists. Also I might need to get my resists to 700 and 30k Health but Im getting into the 6 mil a piece category for upgrades that would have 60+ AR along with Int, Vit, and at least 18 MF. I will probably stick to Act 1 for a little while longer. If I get another 1350 DPS Helion with 80% crit to drop I will get some upgrades and try Act 2 again.
Also does attack speed matter at all with this type build? Im using a slow 1.2 speed mace because it was only 3 mil and had 740 DPS, 215 int, 220 vit, and 786 LoH. Was like a 3k DPS upgrade over my wand.
Quite honestly, you shouldn't have a problem farming A2 at all. The constructs, as far as I'm aware, are all bugged to ignore resists, which was the catalyst of why I started playing around with an archon build in the first place. They also have trouble crossing smaller bridges, so you can bottleneck them there. It takes a bit of practice, but as you keep at it, they'll become less and less of a problem.
I'm at 30k HP, 17.5k dps, and 17 APoC since I posted last, and breeze through A2 to farm. With your stats, you shouldn't be hitting too many brick walls. Arcane sentries are always bad news if you drop yourself into a corner to nova spam, and if you do the same against frozen packs, you need to have your winds up and going to refresh diamond skin after each explosion, but the rest should be cake for you. It sounds like you just need to practice the build itself.
I would also love to just farm with you. I can't afford MF gear, and I can't find anything that sells on the AH, so I'm in this grind limbo right now. I've got no problem tanking for you to help you get used to it. Maybe I could help you identify what's giving you so many problems when you should really be doing much better than I am. Higher DPS gives you such a larger margin for error it's incredible.
Attack speed is a "fake" DPS upgrade. It doesn't do well with most of our spells, but it does help Archon out quite a bit. It'll inflate your paper doll (character sheet) DPS value, but most of the time you won't notice any application benefit.
I love the guide, I literally hit a brick wall with my Wizard and benched him in favor of a Barb that can, quite frankly, do it cheaper and easier. I just love playing caster classes though, and the sound for Revenge grates on my ears. Seriously, it sounds like you're squishing a pig. It's awful to the point where I hate grouping with Barbs now.
I did have to change a few things, since I did start out with resist gear and armor. I run prismatic to get to the 8k armor/1k resists benchmark. I've only got 12k dps (before talents), 24.5% crit, and 10 AP/crit from my helm only. Crit damage is 50%, only 850 LoH. 22.5k health. Not stellar stats by any means, but I Just. Don't. Die.
I kept twister with wicked wind glyphed. I've tried every spell combo, but this spell is the most reliable when it comes to taking full advantage of critical mass.
I put diamond skin on Right Mouse because I was getting random lag spikes that would only activate one number hotkey at a time. Putting this ability on Right Mouse fixed that, as well as when I pop out of archon, I immediately cast my skin, so I don't have to stare at timers and can focus more on positioning. More on Archon later.
Frost Nova on number one, the spamming key. It's incredibly important when you're out of Archon for your survivability, and syngergizes so insanely well with wicked wind spam it's sickening.
Improved Archon for number 2. My DPS is low and I was having a stupidly hard time killing goblins with the standard build, and goblins give great loot. Improved Archon gives a great deal of burst that is difficult to outrun, and with Temporal Flux, gives you a wide stream of death that quickly and easily tears through large packs of minions, and with LoH, any illusionist pack melts while you stay nearly topped off. The extra 40% bump in defensive stats mitigates the loss of Nova and DS to give you plenty of survivability, and Archon can fire through walls, so wallers become an immediate joke. This ability becomes even more useful when you run into those pesky ranged or kiting packs that just refuse to stand still long enough for you to get a few winds going so you can keep them locked down with frost nova. Those packs are generally fairly weak and Archon melts them rather quickly, even with my lower DPS build. The major disadvantage is that with single targets, Archon doesn't get much from LoH.
3 is Magic weapon with Force weapon because, like I said, I need to get more DPS out. I hit that survivability threshold, so any DPS I can force into the build until I can afford better gear is a welcomed change.
4 is Energy armor with Prismatic, because I find steady damage easier to control than the 35% max hit spikes that occasionally drop me in a few hits. If I had under 18k health, I'd probably be using Force, since that's an easier spike to regen from.
Glass cannon for my first passive. I still have a lot of survivability with these resistances, so the extra 15% damage seemed like a no-brainer. Temporal Flux for the arcane slow for those instances where I get too much at once and just absolutely have to run away to regroup a bit, since it works with Wind and in Archon. And lastly, Critical Mass, which is essential for this build.
This build goes any combination of tank, dps, melee, or ranged with great survivability across the board. Some packs are easiest sitting in a corner spamming novas and keeping DS from allowing you to actually get hit, and other packs demand you just sit back and nuke from afar. As my DPS slowly increases, I tend to find myself more and more in Archon, which lends itself naturally to the high DPS Archon build transition as you gear up piece by piece.
For group play, I'll often drop Nova and replace it with Sparkflint Familiar if I have a tank, or drop critical mass in favor of Blur and swap Archon with Venom Hydra to tank. Small gear swaps when necessary, also depending on the group dynamic. I really don't have to switch around a lot with this build. I'm having a great deal of fun switching between damage and survivability, and it's helped me breeze through A3 and A4 where before I couldn't even start A2.
I am interested in any other suggestion any of you may have too. This build takes a bit of farming/money from the OP's build, but it's still not incredibly expensive. It helps bridge the gap I had trouble with when I started with the initial build from the OP, namely, kiting mobs and goblins. This build gave me a bit more flexibility, but has a bit of a higher item requirement.
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There's also another reasons, of course. People like using the skills available, and with the way NV works currently, you build around a skill set that is a "jack of all trades", which leaves speciality skills unused, regardless of how powerful they are, solely because they don't perform well in as many situations as other skills. Instead of building around certain affix's or boss encounters, you build around what works best for everything, and that pigeon-holes build diversity across the board. There are a great number of skills I'd love to play around with on certain affix's and bosses, but I'll never touch because they are useless past that and they kill my farming having them on the bars.
Or we can go with the low IQ part. I'm sure that's it. /sarcasm
I don't agree with putting an ICD on CM being more elegant. WW is the sole outlier with CM due to it's incredible hit rate, and this change will put it pretty much on par with the rest of a melee wizard's available toolkit.
I do it with Life regen per second. LoH wands became too expensive when I started my CM set, but LPS was still cheap. My breaks between diamond skins are generally less than a second though, and almost always due to a double sentry. I might lose half to 3/4 of my health there, and then have that time for the sentries to swing all the way around again to recover. You don't need a lot for that.
They did up the amount of damage required to stutter champs and elites a couple weeks ago after one of their patches dropped it too low. If you're at the same damage as before that may also be the issue.
Quite honestly, you shouldn't have a problem farming A2 at all. The constructs, as far as I'm aware, are all bugged to ignore resists, which was the catalyst of why I started playing around with an archon build in the first place. They also have trouble crossing smaller bridges, so you can bottleneck them there. It takes a bit of practice, but as you keep at it, they'll become less and less of a problem.
I'm at 30k HP, 17.5k dps, and 17 APoC since I posted last, and breeze through A2 to farm. With your stats, you shouldn't be hitting too many brick walls. Arcane sentries are always bad news if you drop yourself into a corner to nova spam, and if you do the same against frozen packs, you need to have your winds up and going to refresh diamond skin after each explosion, but the rest should be cake for you. It sounds like you just need to practice the build itself.
I would also love to just farm with you. I can't afford MF gear, and I can't find anything that sells on the AH, so I'm in this grind limbo right now. I've got no problem tanking for you to help you get used to it. Maybe I could help you identify what's giving you so many problems when you should really be doing much better than I am. Higher DPS gives you such a larger margin for error it's incredible.
Attack speed is a "fake" DPS upgrade. It doesn't do well with most of our spells, but it does help Archon out quite a bit. It'll inflate your paper doll (character sheet) DPS value, but most of the time you won't notice any application benefit.
Medieve#1336
I did have to change a few things, since I did start out with resist gear and armor. I run prismatic to get to the 8k armor/1k resists benchmark. I've only got 12k dps (before talents), 24.5% crit, and 10 AP/crit from my helm only. Crit damage is 50%, only 850 LoH. 22.5k health. Not stellar stats by any means, but I Just. Don't. Die.
I kept twister with wicked wind glyphed. I've tried every spell combo, but this spell is the most reliable when it comes to taking full advantage of critical mass.
I put diamond skin on Right Mouse because I was getting random lag spikes that would only activate one number hotkey at a time. Putting this ability on Right Mouse fixed that, as well as when I pop out of archon, I immediately cast my skin, so I don't have to stare at timers and can focus more on positioning. More on Archon later.
Frost Nova on number one, the spamming key. It's incredibly important when you're out of Archon for your survivability, and syngergizes so insanely well with wicked wind spam it's sickening.
Improved Archon for number 2. My DPS is low and I was having a stupidly hard time killing goblins with the standard build, and goblins give great loot. Improved Archon gives a great deal of burst that is difficult to outrun, and with Temporal Flux, gives you a wide stream of death that quickly and easily tears through large packs of minions, and with LoH, any illusionist pack melts while you stay nearly topped off. The extra 40% bump in defensive stats mitigates the loss of Nova and DS to give you plenty of survivability, and Archon can fire through walls, so wallers become an immediate joke. This ability becomes even more useful when you run into those pesky ranged or kiting packs that just refuse to stand still long enough for you to get a few winds going so you can keep them locked down with frost nova. Those packs are generally fairly weak and Archon melts them rather quickly, even with my lower DPS build. The major disadvantage is that with single targets, Archon doesn't get much from LoH.
3 is Magic weapon with Force weapon because, like I said, I need to get more DPS out. I hit that survivability threshold, so any DPS I can force into the build until I can afford better gear is a welcomed change.
4 is Energy armor with Prismatic, because I find steady damage easier to control than the 35% max hit spikes that occasionally drop me in a few hits. If I had under 18k health, I'd probably be using Force, since that's an easier spike to regen from.
Glass cannon for my first passive. I still have a lot of survivability with these resistances, so the extra 15% damage seemed like a no-brainer. Temporal Flux for the arcane slow for those instances where I get too much at once and just absolutely have to run away to regroup a bit, since it works with Wind and in Archon. And lastly, Critical Mass, which is essential for this build.
This build goes any combination of tank, dps, melee, or ranged with great survivability across the board. Some packs are easiest sitting in a corner spamming novas and keeping DS from allowing you to actually get hit, and other packs demand you just sit back and nuke from afar. As my DPS slowly increases, I tend to find myself more and more in Archon, which lends itself naturally to the high DPS Archon build transition as you gear up piece by piece.
For group play, I'll often drop Nova and replace it with Sparkflint Familiar if I have a tank, or drop critical mass in favor of Blur and swap Archon with Venom Hydra to tank. Small gear swaps when necessary, also depending on the group dynamic. I really don't have to switch around a lot with this build. I'm having a great deal of fun switching between damage and survivability, and it's helped me breeze through A3 and A4 where before I couldn't even start A2.
I am interested in any other suggestion any of you may have too. This build takes a bit of farming/money from the OP's build, but it's still not incredibly expensive. It helps bridge the gap I had trouble with when I started with the initial build from the OP, namely, kiting mobs and goblins. This build gave me a bit more flexibility, but has a bit of a higher item requirement.