No it does not, it only makes Hydra attack faster, it doesn't increase it's damage.
They did allow on the PTR that blazing hydra was going to scale with AS for damage, but they removed that, leaving Blazing hydra in the dust behind Mammoth.
The mammoths attack faster and the rivers stack, so yes it's going to do more damage.
That said, unless you're planning on the 3.04 hydra break point it's fine to keep the vitality since 2.47 is easily achievable elsewhere on your gear.
EB being outside the global is beside the point. The point is that you don't need MM as a damage source with EB, and you'd be better off further empowering EB with other skills like Force weapon (20% dmg) than trying to weave in magic missile (get in close with EB, standing still and firing MM isn't really great). Benefit of EB is the mobility+the high damage. Hexing pants further empowers the build, and MM can't be used if you want to take advantage of those.
MM/Conflagrate is commonly paired with EB for several reasons:
1. To shore up single target damage. Sorry but killing T6 rift guardians with explosive blast by itself is painfully slow. After stacking some DoTs, MM/Conflagrate can easily out damage whatever you're doing with EB.
2. Sometimes you need a ranged option. EB requires you to be in melee range which is a recipe for getting gibbed when facing certain elite affixes.
3. Mirrorball rolls with CDR making it pair naturally with WoW/EB builds.
Also, Hexing Pants are doable with MM if you stutterstep. It personally didn't work for my play style but I'm sure there are players way more skilled than me who are making it work.
I'm using Hexing Pants with Woh/Mirrorball now and am still getting used to stutter stepping but it does work. One thing I'venoticed though isthat if I'm lagging, my damage will flicker up and down even if I'm constantly running.
Do people not run with any +elite damage? See most people list Sheet DPS +ele and +skill but not much +elite; is it considered a bad stat?
+Elite damage isn't a bad stat at all, and I would consider it pretty important at higher torments. I find trash mobs will die quickly no matter what the difficulty and it's always the elites that can tank your hits a bit that you need to worry about. If you don’t kill them quickly it just gives them more opportunity to wreck your shit with jailer, arcane sentries, walls, etc.
Doing T4 solo with the below but usually spec up with magic find gear and drop down to T2-3 for group play. T5 is also doable but elite Corrupted Angels will ruin my day (running fire build)
unbuffed 640k sheet DPS (1.1 million buffed), +103% fire damage, +83% elite damage.
Your defensive stats look fine. I have similar AR and armor in my magic find setup with significantly less life and I’m able to comfortably do T3. Your DPS seems a bit low though and I think sacrificing some of your vitality to boost your kill speed will help a lot. I’ll limit my commentary on gear since for the most part you don’t find items in D3, the items find you, but at first glance:
Shoulders and bracers are good spots for the Aughild’s crafted set since there isn’t a lot of great wizard specific gear for these slots, and Aughild’s will help a lot with taking down elites. Since it doesn’t look like you have a Ring of Royal Grandeur, you can also use the Aughild’s chest piece to get the 3 piece set bonus. Make sure that your chest piece has 3 sockets though as that’s generally much better than any other stats that can roll for a chest. I would at the very least try to enchant Tyrael’s Might to have 3 sockets and sticking the highest topazes I could find in there.
Triumvirate doesn’t help you that much since it doesn’t add to cold damage. Your off hand would be my first priority in upgrading through gambling since there are a lot of viable options here and it’s a cheap gamble through Kadala at only 5 shards. Winter’s Flurry, Mirrorball, and Light of Grace would all be upgrades I would think.
Anything that allows you to stack additional cold damage would obviously be an upgrade including an appropriate Stone of Jordan or Andariel’s Visage. Frostburns could also be an upgrade but it would be hard to tell since your Talons are boss and you would break up your 2-piece bonus.
Skill choices boil down to personal preference but I would switch Deflection to Force Weapon and Pinpoint Barrier to Prismatic Armor. I think you would need to stack more IAS to take advantage of Deflection and the extra 10% boost from Force Weapon should be better than the 5% critical hit chance you get from Pinpoint Barrier (Diabloprogress.com shows it would be about a 10,000 DPS increase).
So I decided to try this build out as a change of pace after a bunch of mediocre fire stuff came my way. I was running Tal's set + Mirror Ball-Charged Blast with a Moonlight Ward before and I'm not sure if it's the ability to stack so much extra +Fire or if Mirror Ball-Conflagrate is that much better than everything else but my kill speed on T3/T4wentup significantly even with garbaggio fire items. Thanks for the build, I was honestly surprised at how much more effective I was and will be doing some Ghom tests tonight.
Cool build! I've been running something similar-ish but use Arcane Orbit instead of Wave of Force, do you know how they compare? ATM T1 is autopilot for me to the point where I find I'm not even casting MM that much (everything just blows up) and have been playing around with the idea of crafting a Cosmic Strand and running Teleport - Calamity instead.
none of them have a wizard lol. 2 monks and a barb lol. They gave me a hard time for getting lucky, but none of them wanted it. Can't bring myself to salvage it.
The mere thought of someone salvaging a Moonlight Ward makes me want to throw up. At the least, I would reroll the Int into CHD and use it on a melee class (which your friends could have done).
Moonlight is a melee-friendly amulet, he uses mainly range skills, moonlight is wasted if he's not facetanking. And Moonlight rolls with as, crit, and arcane dmg baseline, you have to roll intel on the amulet to have arcane dmg, crit, crit dmg, and int. Moonlight is a 700~ intel loss for ias. Not to mention a 70 all res loss due to the intel.
I've found that IAS isn't that important since it can't roll as high anymore, and you can still get+arcane, CC, CHD, and intel on a Moonlight Ward. I recently switched out my Tal's amulet for one and my overall kill speed on Torment 3 and below went up dramatically (even though I had to gowith alevel 60 Tal's belt instead of WH to maintain the set bonus). I redid my build to be more focused on close range but I'd probably still end up using it just for the +arcane bonus.
Ran this for about 2 hours last night. Got 3 Amulets, 4 plans, 1 Shoulders, 1 Bracers, and 1 Staff. Tried again this morning and only got 1 plan. Good while it lasted I guess.
That said, unless you're planning on the 3.04 hydra break point it's fine to keep the vitality since 2.47 is easily achievable elsewhere on your gear.
1. To shore up single target damage. Sorry but killing T6 rift guardians with explosive blast by itself is painfully slow. After stacking some DoTs, MM/Conflagrate can easily out damage whatever you're doing with EB.
2. Sometimes you need a ranged option. EB requires you to be in melee range which is a recipe for getting gibbed when facing certain elite affixes.
3. Mirrorball rolls with CDR making it pair naturally with WoW/EB builds.
Also, Hexing Pants are doable with MM if you stutterstep. It personally didn't work for my play style but I'm sure there are players way more skilled than me who are making it work.
Doing T4 solo with the below but usually spec up with magic find gear and drop down to T2-3 for group play. T5 is also doable but elite Corrupted Angels will ruin my day (running fire build)
unbuffed 640k sheet DPS (1.1 million buffed), +103% fire damage, +83% elite damage.
2.9 million profile toughness
- Shoulders and bracers are good spots for the Aughild’s crafted set since there isn’t a lot of great wizard specific gear for these slots, and Aughild’s will help a lot with taking down elites. Since it doesn’t look like you have a Ring of Royal Grandeur, you can also use the Aughild’s chest piece to get the 3 piece set bonus. Make sure that your chest piece has 3 sockets though as that’s generally much better than any other stats that can roll for a chest. I would at the very least try to enchant Tyrael’s Might to have 3 sockets and sticking the highest topazes I could find in there.
- Triumvirate doesn’t help you that much since it doesn’t add to cold damage. Your off hand would be my first priority in upgrading through gambling since there are a lot of viable options here and it’s a cheap gamble through Kadala at only 5 shards. Winter’s Flurry, Mirrorball, and Light of Grace would all be upgrades I would think.
Anything that allows you to stack additional cold damage would obviously be an upgrade including an appropriate Stone of Jordan or Andariel’s Visage. Frostburns could also be an upgrade but it would be hard to tell since your Talons are boss and you would break up your 2-piece bonus.Skill choices boil down to personal preference but I would switch Deflection to Force Weapon and Pinpoint Barrier to Prismatic Armor. I think you would need to stack more IAS to take advantage of Deflection and the extra 10% boost from Force Weapon should be better than the 5% critical hit chance you get from Pinpoint Barrier (Diabloprogress.com shows it would be about a 10,000 DPS increase).
Link to armory profile:http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/immortalNS-1693/hero/40484492
Preference for softcore (SC) or hardcore (HC):SC
Average time available to play (hours per week): 15-20 hours
Preferred difficulty level:T2+
I'm decently geared, my profile is here:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/immortalNS-1693/hero/40484492
Let me know if there's anyone out there looking for a new member, thanks!