Hey Kams, what's up man, it's Lupita. I've been playing this build since before you were as you know and I just wanted to make a few comments about it.Here's my diabloprogress for reference: http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/lupita-1542/Heylia/17671528
The only thing I'm really missing is a fire trifecta amulet, better RoRG, and Witching Hour instead of Harringtons, and I believe that the setup I'm using is the absolute most optimal one, and I'm fairly certain it's the same setup that you are using. I see some Wizards using Tals, or using Vyr's Gloves instead of magefists, and while if you need to do those things because you don't have the gear that's certainly fine, it's going to nerf your damage with this build considerably.
I also want to mention that I've been paying a lot of attention to Avoidlol, who is a twitch streamer, and the only twitch streamer other than yourself that really knows what's up on a Wizard. If you want to see a streamer that plays at the same level as Kams with this build I highly recommend checking him out.
You've pretty much nailed everything here, but I disagree with some of the paragon stat allocations, that being offense and defense. I firmly believe through extensive testing that these are the most optimal settings for those, taking into account a high end gear-set:
offense: critical hit damage > attack speed > crit hit chance > cooldown reduction
explanation: I firmly believe that attempting to stack cooldown reduction with this spec is a mistake. You want to get CDR on shoulders, Mirrorball, and the gem from your helm, and obviously Evocation. This gives you around 48-50% which gives you more than enough sustainability in T6. Attempting to get 60-70% CDR nerfs your damage too much. I believe that setting your gear up in this manner makes you just as powerful out of archon form (in terms of damage, not survivability) as you are in archon form. Additionally, there's some things you can do to help cheese CDR which I'll discuss in a second. On the topic of attack speed versus crit chance, it's pretty negligible to me, but the reason I like attack speed is because of Jade Witch Doctors in group play. They kill things so fast, you need to be attacking and stacking conflag as fast as you can if you want any chance of keeping up with them, and I truly believe the Jade set is overpowered in that regard. This is combined with the fact that we already should have 55%+ crit on gear, which should be more than enough.
defense: Armor > Life > Life Regen > All Resist
explanation: We don't need paragon points into all resist. I have zero points in it and I'm rocking 1600-1800 all resist, which should be pretty typical for this gear setup around paragon 400. Armor is the best stat for T6 as we are frequently in melee range trying to maximize damage from Audacity as well as meleeing in archon form, and life provides us with the buffer we really need when we get some of those awful act 5 mobs, triple packs, or bad affixes. The life regen is also very nice when combined with your templar when soloing.
This brings me to one last thing that I want to discuss, which is the follower that you want to use when soloing T6 with this build. You absolutely want to use a templar, nothing else. I had a pretty rough time getting the correct templar relic for it, but once I did, it was a complete game-changer in terms of solo play.
Gear for your templar:
Relic: The one that makes it so he cannot die, which synergizes with Unity.
Main hand: Strength Thunderfury (rolled to cold damage) or Strength Azurewrath
You wan't this to be as high damage as possible. If you use a Thunderfury on him, make sure you reroll the damage roll to cold damage, as it will proc elemental exposure.
Neck: The Ess of Johan
This is an absolute game changer for solo play. It essentially turns your templar into a pull monk, as the passive on Johan gives him a chance on hit to pull all enemies into him and slow them by 60%. Get one with Strength, and try to get as much damage on it as you possibly can.
Rings: Unity and Bul-Kathos Wedding Band
For solo play, you want to replace your SoJ with a Unity with crit and chd. The lost 15% elite damage and elemental damage is well worth it to be able to take 50% less damage on T6. Bul-Kathos makes him drain life from enemies, which is great since he is constantly pulling enemies in with The Ess of Johan. I'm not really sure how much damage Bul-Kathos is actually doing here, so you could replace this with a MF ring, Leorics, or a Puzzle ring if you wanted, it probably doesn't matter that much.
Shield: I'm open to suggestions for this. Currently I'm just using a level 60 stormshield because I just put my templar together and I don't have anything. I'm inclined to think that you just want any shield with giant strength + 10% crit chance + a socket, but if there's any shields out there with sweet passives I'm open to suggestions for sure.
Skills: Heal, Loyalty, Charge, Guardian.
I can't tell you how many times he has topped me off with a heal, or guardian has gone off and saved me on a bad pack. These are definitely the skills you want, the other skills are useless.
Before I end my little rant here, I also want to mention some items that you want to keep in your inventory to swap to in certain situations.
Trang-Ouls Coils: Has a passive that lowers the duration of your cooldowns by 50-60 seconds depending on the roll whenever you use a health shrine. You can frequently use these to reset your archon cooldown during rifts, allowing you to play much more aggressively.
Warzuchan (sp?) Armguards: The ones that give you a stacking speed buff when you destroy a breakable object. Pop these on when you hit a conduit shrine and have fun killing everything on the level.
Nemesis Bracers: everyone knows about these, but I thought I'd list them anyway.
Mara's, Talisman of Aranoch, Countess Julia's, etc: These things can be so good against rift guardians and shitty packs. For example, the tentacle rift boss that shoots out poison literally can't do damage to you if you put a Mara's on. Hold onto these, even if they are bad rolls. Ideally you want to get a fire trifecta Countess Julia's and use that as your main neck. It seems to me that Arcane is the most common monster affix, and when you stand on the ball of a arcane beam with countess julia's on, your health won't move. no matter how many mobs are on you.
Homing Pads: Slap them on whenever you need to get back to town and toy have stuff on you obviously.
The Burning Axe of Sankriss: Depending on the roll you get, this weapon is much better than Thunderfury on a single target (i.e. a Rift Guardian). Thunderfury is definitely the way to go for all aoe packs though.
I hope you guys found some of this information useful, and thanks for this thread Kams. I truly believe this is the best end-game spec for Wizards. I've stopped trying to explain to people why Wand of WoH is bad. Eventually they will get one and see for themselves how slow and un-survivable it is on higher torments compared to this build.
Thank for you all the info Lupita. I didn't give much thought to the follower and those fun items like the Ess of Johan. I have been using the enchantress because the mass chicken thing is really nice but you are selling me on thsi Templar. You make a good point about CDR paragon points for this build and I swapped mine and will update the front post. Thank you again this post is really thorough!
Glad you like it. BTW it's viable for T5 as well, if you replace Pinpoint Barrier with Prismatic Armor.
What I really like to do with this build is to replace:
Mirrorball -> Firebird's source with +fire and +WoF bonuses
Pinpoint Barrier -> Prismatic Armor
Blur -> Glass Cannon
Illusionist -> Prodigy
i.e. http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#adQjSO!Ygci!ccZaZc - and go humiliate T4. WIth +126% fire, +43% vs elites, +28% WoF and Audacity everything that comes too close melts in a second. 22M+ crits on whites and 30M+ crits on elites from Heat Wave.
Wave of Force is awesome for doing the mid to low torments really quickly. I could never get it to work well enough on T5 and T6 which is unfortunate because the best parts of Wave of Force is that you just AoE almost everything on the screen. Very fast for those lower torments though!
I am running a similar build but I have the 4 set bonus for Tal Rasha. I can't seem to get the cold meteor to proc with the cold damage from the thunderfury. I am wondering if the cold damage on the thunderfury will make elemental exposure stack. Anyone know?
It does proc Elemental Exposure. Here is a really nice post about it
What paragon setup would you recommend with the 2.0.5 build?
Magic Missile no Archon Core: Movement Speed to 25% > Intelligence Offense: Critical Hit Damage > Critical Hit Chance > Attack Speed > Cooldown Reduction Defense: Resist All > Armor > Life > Life Regeneration Utility: Area Damage > Life on Hit > Gold Find > Resource Cost Reduction
Magic Missile with Archon Core: Movement Speed to 25% > Intelligence Offense: Cooldown Reduction > Critical Hit Damage > Critical Hit Chance > Attack Speed Defense: Resist All > Armor > Life > Life Regeneration Utility: Area Damage > Life on Hit > Gold Find > Resource Cost Reduction
I should have done this earlier, I will update the post with it too!
I just got the vyr pants to complete the set, what are people's thoughts on re-rolling for +MM damage, vs the 2 sockets. I noticed that the OP went with 2 sockets, instead of +MM damage, so I'm wondering what the thought process was behind that. Thanks!
When I wasn't using Archon I had + Magic Missile damage on my pants and I think it is still worth it for the non Archon build. Preferably on pants with sockets too but that's tough. Archon does a lot of damage so I like having the sockets because it buffs everything.
Also, if I'm not using EE and do not have a thunderfury, will it better to use blazar instead of spellsteal?
I really like Spellsteal for higher Torments when the Black Hole damage wasn't a lot. It gives you some survivability you always manage to get a pretty sizable buff out of each Spellsteal Black Hole too. With all the CDR you have the Spellsteal buff up almost all the time.
I noticed in the video that you were running Andy's helm with cdr gem + Aughild bracers. Do you find that setup to be better or worse than Aughild helm + Strongarm bracers?
I just got the Strongarm bracers the other night and I've been messing with them. I haven't noticed an impact either way but I did get some nice toughness out of the Aughild helm over the Andy's. My Strongarms aren't very good so the debuff they do just countered the fire damage I loss from the Andy's. I think I will keep using them and hope for better ones.
I recorded a few rifts, my average is about 10-12 minutes but I'm getting faster as I get used to what the spec can handle. Here is a link to one that was pretty quick http://youtu.be/4P_Z5-Mnw1E
I finally got a Wand of Woh last night. A good one too and was very excited to try it out because it was the one item I wanted more than anything. I tried a few different builds with Explosive Blast and Archon and builds with no Archon but I could never clear a T6 rift faster than I could with MM/Archon. It is very powerful and most likely better for lower Torments. Having to be up in melee all the time can be tough solo T6 even with all the toughness I put on. Maybe there is a good way to fit in Explosive Blast but at some point it's better to fully commit to one build rather than mix two.
My third Mirrorball dropped, and finally I got two extra missiles! The funny part was that I wasn't excited when it dropped due to already finding two with only one extra missile. I started reading from the bottom up to know whether or not it was a piece of garbage--and my excitement grew the whole time. I believe the in-game damage tops out at 415.
Anyways, I'm assuming that the optimal thing to enchant is 724 Vitality => 15% Magic Missile Damage?
If you aren't using Archon I think the Magic Missile Damage is better. With Archon I am not sure. I have been thinking of rerolling mine to vit but I don't want to regret it.
Yeah I've been wondering if I replaced my and andy helm and make the captain belt and helm to get more CDR but yeah it is hard to know what's better. I recently got a TF and I might mess with that but idk if it's worth 20% fire damage. I really want a wand of woh, then I could replace my mirrorball with a firebirds and drop magic missile for explosive blast. That seems fun
With the new changes I am going to try replacing meteor with Archon and use the Vyr's 4 pc. I cannot get on to mess with it but I will be on streaming later. I changed my gear around a bit to get the Vyr's but there is still a lot of fire damage. Lucky I had CDR on my Mirrorball too, might reroll the missile damage to vit? My armory should be updated to show my new gear, if anyone has suggestions on what to change let me know!
Anyone running t5+ rifts can make any comment about viability of this build? How it works? Pros & coins on this difficulty and higher? Im running classic electrocute+AT arcane based build (1.545m 108% arc dmg, 44% elite with 10-15m tougness based on passives etc) and im wondering if its worth to go to fire, as i heard about fire outperforming any other element on high hp monsters? Im able to switch to fire without any real problems i think (need only decent magefists) and got pretty similar stats, only exception is my lack of fire SoJ.
I am able to do T5 comfortably. If I up the torment to 5+ I have been replacing Familiar with Mammoth Hydra. I use the Hydra on Elite packs and higher HP mobs and it does a lot of damage. I am trying to grab a Wand of Woh to try replacing either the Hydra or Meteor with Explosive Blast but I haven't seen the wand
nerf what? the build is good but isn't viable for high torments in my opinion.
I can do T4 pretty quickly but it's stretching my toughness a bit. If I'm in a group with some defensive buffs it goes a lot smoother and could probably bump it up to T5 but I'm sure there are better builds for the higher torments.
The 2 pc and fire damage are nice but I've found that just spamming the 3 magic missiles in to mobs does more damage than spenders with this build. If you got a mirror ball just mess with it for a bit and see how you like it!
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Thank for you all the info Lupita. I didn't give much thought to the follower and those fun items like the Ess of Johan. I have been using the enchantress because the mass chicken thing is really nice but you are selling me on thsi Templar. You make a good point about CDR paragon points for this build and I swapped mine and will update the front post. Thank you again this post is really thorough!
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Wave of Force is awesome for doing the mid to low torments really quickly. I could never get it to work well enough on T5 and T6 which is unfortunate because the best parts of Wave of Force is that you just AoE almost everything on the screen. Very fast for those lower torments though!
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It does proc Elemental Exposure. Here is a really nice post about it
http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo3Wizards/wiki/elementaldamage#wiki_elemental_exposure
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Yeah I would do Elemental Exposure if you have TF
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Magic Missile no Archon
Core: Movement Speed to 25% > Intelligence
Offense: Critical Hit Damage > Critical Hit Chance > Attack Speed > Cooldown Reduction
Defense: Resist All > Armor > Life > Life Regeneration
Utility: Area Damage > Life on Hit > Gold Find > Resource Cost Reduction
Magic Missile with Archon
Core: Movement Speed to 25% > Intelligence
Offense: Cooldown Reduction > Critical Hit Damage > Critical Hit Chance > Attack Speed
Defense: Resist All > Armor > Life > Life Regeneration
Utility: Area Damage > Life on Hit > Gold Find > Resource Cost Reduction
I should have done this earlier, I will update the post with it too!
When I wasn't using Archon I had + Magic Missile damage on my pants and I think it is still worth it for the non Archon build. Preferably on pants with sockets too but that's tough. Archon does a lot of damage so I like having the sockets because it buffs everything.
I really like Spellsteal for higher Torments when the Black Hole damage wasn't a lot. It gives you some survivability you always manage to get a pretty sizable buff out of each Spellsteal Black Hole too. With all the CDR you have the Spellsteal buff up almost all the time.
I just got the Strongarm bracers the other night and I've been messing with them. I haven't noticed an impact either way but I did get some nice toughness out of the Aughild helm over the Andy's. My Strongarms aren't very good so the debuff they do just countered the fire damage I loss from the Andy's. I think I will keep using them and hope for better ones.
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I recorded a few rifts, my average is about 10-12 minutes but I'm getting faster as I get used to what the spec can handle. Here is a link to one that was pretty quick http://youtu.be/4P_Z5-Mnw1E
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I finally got a Wand of Woh last night. A good one too and was very excited to try it out because it was the one item I wanted more than anything. I tried a few different builds with Explosive Blast and Archon and builds with no Archon but I could never clear a T6 rift faster than I could with MM/Archon. It is very powerful and most likely better for lower Torments. Having to be up in melee all the time can be tough solo T6 even with all the toughness I put on. Maybe there is a good way to fit in Explosive Blast but at some point it's better to fully commit to one build rather than mix two.
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If you aren't using Archon I think the Magic Missile Damage is better. With Archon I am not sure. I have been thinking of rerolling mine to vit but I don't want to regret it.
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Yeah I've been wondering if I replaced my and andy helm and make the captain belt and helm to get more CDR but yeah it is hard to know what's better. I recently got a TF and I might mess with that but idk if it's worth 20% fire damage. I really want a wand of woh, then I could replace my mirrorball with a firebirds and drop magic missile for explosive blast. That seems fun
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With the new changes I am going to try replacing meteor with Archon and use the Vyr's 4 pc. I cannot get on to mess with it but I will be on streaming later. I changed my gear around a bit to get the Vyr's but there is still a lot of fire damage. Lucky I had CDR on my Mirrorball too, might reroll the missile damage to vit? My armory should be updated to show my new gear, if anyone has suggestions on what to change let me know!
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I am able to do T5 comfortably. If I up the torment to 5+ I have been replacing Familiar with Mammoth Hydra. I use the Hydra on Elite packs and higher HP mobs and it does a lot of damage. I am trying to grab a Wand of Woh to try replacing either the Hydra or Meteor with Explosive Blast but I haven't seen the wand
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I got sort of lucky. It was pre any buff and the mirrorball I'm using is the first legendary I got off of her
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I can do T4 pretty quickly but it's stretching my toughness a bit. If I'm in a group with some defensive buffs it goes a lot smoother and could probably bump it up to T5 but I'm sure there are better builds for the higher torments.
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You could give it a shot but if only 1 extra missile still makes it a good signature spell for other builds
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The 2 pc and fire damage are nice but I've found that just spamming the 3 magic missiles in to mobs does more damage than spenders with this build. If you got a mirror ball just mess with it for a bit and see how you like it!