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Beaten lvl 27 solo with my hardcore wizard (15 (pinpoint barrier) - 19 (pinpoint barrier + unwavering will) - 26 (FA/PB + UW + AT/FW) millions toughness), but that is about the limit of what I can achieve as Rift Guardian is way too tough for me to kill it quickly and any decent hit will at very least take a half of my health.

Ray of Frost, however, can be turned into a overpentrating beam like disintegrate with a certain legendary source. It's fairly common, so once you obtain it, Ray of Frost becomes truly viable. Until then... Disintegrate is probably way better.

Imho, Axe of Sankis or Devastator would be better as they both are one-handed, thus allowing a greater freedom with the pieces of Firebird to equip. And if you will use either with the Eye, you will have no less +%fire than with perfectly-rolled Maximus.

As for the Maximus's legendary affix, wouldn't this demon be not that useful once you get past lvl 25 or something like that?

I don't think I've ever forget about any items I have on my account,.. Though given that I have all 4 tabs of stuff AND 3 mules, remembering where exactly the item is might be not as easy.

As for the difficulty jump between t1 and t2, its 144% increase in monster damage, so, yes, the difference is quite noticeable (this is especially true for wizards that rely on shields: at lvl 70 my wiz can ignore pretty much everything on t2 thanks to them, but on t3 the shields already fail me routinely when fighting elites... and on t4...)

And call it hardcore-hoarding mode, but I have full sets of leveling gear (especially at 40+... pretty much everything sans jewelry is level reduced), so now I can go 1 to 70 on torment 1 without ever lowering difficulty.

Actually, I'm not sure you can equip both lvl 60 and 70 Hellfires at the same time. I'm too lazy to search for it right now, but I think there was a blue post regarding that issue near the end of 2.0 PTR/beta.
What I know is that you definitely can't have both Hellfire ring and Hellfire amulet at the the same time (then again, since they both can be equipped on lvl1 character, it is kinda understandable --- lvl1 hero with 1000+ mainstat/vit not counting what you get through paragon points is a bit too unbalanced)

Let me add my own two cents.

Wizard passives that are alright in my opinion: Blur, Evocation, Prodigy, Astral Presence, Illusionist, Cold Blooded, Conflagration, Temporal Flux, Unwavering Will. The UW though could benefit from added crowd control resistance/immunity, but whatever.

I have never used Arcane Dynamo, Audacity and Elemental Exposure myself, so I can't say anything about them. But considering that at least AD and EE are used frequently by other wizards, they are quite fine as well.

As for the rest..

• Power Hungry - mostly useless right now. But I disagree with the proposition of "Gain 1% dmg for every 1% arcane power missing" as well --- that would make it too powerful: if you can channel your attack indefinitely, just waste enough AP on armor spells/whatever and you get - say - Ray of Frost that will do >2000% when fully ramped, instead of usual 1200%. However, at this point, I don't think I can propose any solution of my own for this passive.
• Glass Cannon - Indeed, the mitigation cost is a bit too much. Probably, reducing max life instead of mitigation is the best way to 'fix' this passive.
• Paralysis - Increase the stun duration to 2 seconds. That should be more than enough. Actually, Paralysis is mostly alright even as it is... it's just lightning itself is a rather weak element at the moment...
• Galvanizing Ward - Anyone actually uses it? How about, changing it into something like 'you gain X% more shields from all sources'? X should be no less than 50%, otherwise it will not be of any use...
• Unstable Anomaly - Should gain two additional effects: 1) All crowd control effects on you are broken and you are immune to crowd control effects for the next 3 seconds. 2) Some sort of additional mitigation for a couple of seconds. The amount of life restored can be reduced to compensate for these changes.

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.

If it is affordable, roll another socket on her chestpiece. And depending on the needs, insert either an amethyst or a diamond here. Something similar goes for pants. I don't think that those 11% to shock pulse is worth that much - swap it for double socket. She can even stick topazs in here to compensate some damage loss (that will still give 44-56 all res, which will buff toughness).

As for the rest... obtaining another gloves wouldn't be a bad idea... right now 14%aoe is pretty much a wasted affix. I know, it might be not easy to get something like that, but int-vit-cc-ias gloves will do wonders. Same for shoulders. RCR is not really needed for archont, so it might be not a bad idea to get shoulders with int-vit-armor/allres-cdr.

Other than that... I'm a hardcore player, not to mention I run an entirely different build. Plus, even though I do have 1.25 millions profile damage in-game (just below 2 millions elemental) and 15.5 / 20 millions toughness WITHOUT force armor, I don't go higher than T3 ever. Thus I'm not really sure I'm qualified to give more advices here...

I was actually thinking about something different.... Tentatively this set is named "the Mantle of Storms"

• 1st partial: +250 int, your storm armor now strikes twice as often
• 2nd partial: Storm armor gains effects of all runes (visuals are either random, or currently-equipped rune)
• full set: Storm armor is now a part of you, you can equip another armor spell

As the result, you gain a powerful auto-attack + %weapon damage based "thorns", your critical hits strike nearby enemies, you get flat 3 AP cost reduction and you get movement speed buff on being hit... And on top of that you can use prismatic / pin-point barrier.

The idea for a set that allows wielding staff + source could be quite alright too...

I apologize in advance for not specifying this is for US Only. My EU Character is a wizard and has not been leveled to 70 yet.

For those playing on EU servers...

I can offer some help for the 'young' Wizards / WDs / Crusaders (Hardcore only). I have some lvl-reduced gear and can do some powerleveling... Unfortunately, RNG usually hates me, so hunting specific legendaries is not something I can really provide...

Now that is a real buff!sucksthat it need 6 pieces for the bonus though would be good to have mirrorball, the new Depth Diggers with Serpent Sparker with it

You still can (with RoRG) -- Firebird set has 7 (!) potential pieces: helm, shoulders, gloves, chest, pants, boots and source. And the new depth diggers will most definitely buff at very least MM/conflag far more than cindercoat + magefists can, thus those two can be sacrificed. As for the fire builds not relying on magic missile, do they actually need Mirrorball or the new DDs?

Sounds at very least useable now, but...

Doesn't fire have enough love as it is? They should rename the set into "thunderbird" and finally give the lightning some so much needed buff. From my own statistics (EU HC), only about 1 wizard of 15 uses lightning skills, and almost always it is electrocute / surge of power - a way to quickly restore arcane power, in other words. Another lightning attack that I've seen used is electrocute / forked lighting - crowd control through passive / wyrdward ring. Over the last month I've seen only two wizards that used non-generator lightning skills. One used arcane orb, the other used hydra...

Now compare that to the amount of people using fire / cold / arcane builds (I'm a RoF wiz myself), and you will see that it is lightning that needs some more love, not fire.

• The icon for Area damage in utility tab of paragon points has changed...
• The gold amount is once again displayed for the stacks on the ground.
• Stormshield now has (or at least might have) 5 primaries. Reduction from elites is bugged, though... mine rolled as 0.5% (!!!)

As for WD pets... I didn't notice mine dealing significantly different damage numbers than they do on live.

There is a mistake in database concerning that bonus to damage. I own Mask of Jeram with +84%... And have seen as much as +99%.

No, for pet wd helm should be Mask of Jeram and nothing else if you want to be effective. If you want to have full zuni set, then it's probably better if you go for boots + chest + mojo. Since you won't be in the middle of the fight, damage reduction is not that crucial as it is for jade build.

For pet build, Tasker and Theo are some very desirable gloves, but I've heard that obtaining them might take quite a lot of work... 30k+ shards and more, if RNG hates you.

Most pets deal physical damage, though fire Gargantua is used quite often as well. Don't see fire dogs as often, by they are used from time to time... So pick your element out of those two. If fetishes will be your main damage dealer, than physical is probably the best choice.