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My brother is really struggling vs elite packs on his wizard, and while I throw him most of the useful gear I find for him it's getting a tad old to just keep giving and giving to nearly everyone I know without receiving anything, and to hear them complain about not progressing everytime I find a new item or when I was still killing new bosses, and rolling new guys or going back to playing terrible wow. He dies maybe 20-30 times stacking valor and downing the Sbreaker in act 3.

He only has ~25k hp and maybe 200 resist all, +10% movement speed with 39k dmg buffed with magic weapon. What is something I can do for him, within the limits of 5 million gold, to get him able to solo the elites in act 3/4 inferno with some efficiency so he can take care of himself and maybe even find me something? I get it that you need ~40k hp, what's a reasonable amount of HP, resist all, and damage combined with that build in order to solo inferno?

Is there some kind of threshhold when you cross 500 resist all and 40k hp that you just feel much more powerful and are able to take some hurting, or is wizard something of a glass cannon like my demon hunter? I don't know what direction to point him because I don't have the experience with feeling it out myself.

Yeah, grats on killing him by the way, I killed him not too long ago myself when I got bored of my magic find runs.

Bows win for cosmetics!

The debuff he gives you comes from melee. If you get it in phase 1 just sprint over to a well, it removes debuffs ontop of doing the obvious, restoring the hp you lost in the meantime.

In all phases stay away from the outer and inner edges of the level. Touching near them with your character makes diablo teleport ontop of you, because otherwise you could bug him out and get him stuck on the inner ledges incredibly easily. Kite him with mobility and stutter step.

Phase 2 is really the only phase that begs you have gear. The faster you kill the clones, the less chance you have to die. It is still doable with crappy gear, like in the video, but it will take some stupid sheer luck with the timing and type of your clones attacks. You never know when a bola will come or a quick impale, and there is a .5 second un-grace time inbetween even lingering fog smokescreens as the ability lasts 1.5 seconds and has a 2 second cooldown.

You can caltrop the clone (instead of having flying vengeance bats) and run away and kite to despawn if you don't have the damage.

+8 max disc is the minimum you will want to play through the game in general, allowing you to pop 3 smoke screens back to back before even needing prep. You can get this on a quiver/cloak

GIven this information, your gear is irrelevant. Well it helps. But it's not a requirement. No go kill diablo for your crappy 3 blues having zero valor stacks

Well since he figured it out, maybe this would be an ok time to ask if there is a difference in loot between act 3 and act 4. I have heard there isn't, which is why I'm asking, though I am doubtful. I have done maybe 20 Sbreaker runs and seen very few good items, whereas I found a 1300 dmg 1her in act 4 randomly off an elite pack.

drop caltrops and pick up either bat companion, mortal enemy marked for death, or final rune spike trap (and sit in lower right corner standing on traps). I don't use vault either.

It gets easier the more damage you have. At first I needed spike traps, and then as my damage increased nether tentacles and hungering could kill all the adds before they got close and almost lock them into hit recovery, using smoke screen sparingly down in the corner. Seriously try standing in the lower right corner (smoke screen there) and spam nether tentacles towards the center of the platform where most of the snakes path (somewhat close to belial, not the outer part), and charge up your hatred with hungering when you're not in immediate danger, using smoke screen for when they spawn near you. If you dont have the damage yet, use spike traps under your feet and they'll protect you.

Then you just have to damage him down fast in phase 2. Again this gets easier the more gear you have because you phase him more quickly meaning fewer possible mistakes, fewer smokescreens required. Nether tentacle is your best friend, I often find it killing him and an add together after he's about half health in that stage.

Then in phase 3 he's ridiculously easy. Just recognize which attack is his tri-attack, which is the single attack, and when he breathes.

Woa.

Crazy.

Ok. This is just a thought train, not something I'm attempting to do in game and definitely not a guide for someone else to follow. In this topic I want to talk more in depth about discipline, smoke screen, vault, and prep and their synergy with each other and how they work with tactical advantage. Bashing on sharpshooter seems to be the topic of the day, because it is so good it draws deserved attention. WIthout further delay...

Here's A build: http://us.battle.net...dTXV!aeX!YcYZYc


By the way, +8 max disc will let you "almost-chain" three LINGERING FOG smokescreens back to back. 38disc, regen 4 during the cooldown on the first two= 42 disc, also the price of three smokescreens. It works out perfectly. It's a cute number to have. With special recipe you'd be able to use three immediately in a row without any additional discipline from gear. Now, I'm not sure about what max disc you can get is, but let's say you got 10 from quiver, 10 from cloak, and 10 from 1h crossbow (or 20 from two 1h crossbow, which is probably preferable for crit damage socket?)

That's 6 smokescreens back to back, if you needed to and guess what, there are probably multiple seconds where you won't need to because of tactical advantage. Also that's 12 seconds of +60% movement speed from tactical advantage. We haven't even talked about vault yet. Say you open up your kiting with vault and set it on cooldown. By time you have used all your smokescreens, it will be off cooldown again. And we haven't even talked about prep. Everyone knows what that does, backup plan procs would be hilarious. Then there's night stalker and given the high crit chance of 1h crossbow, so you could hold off on using (inbetween) preps a few seconds longer adding about another smokescreen to the rotation (7 total or more).

Basically the idea contradicts what most people believe we should be doing, in that you'd be just running circles compared to critting things for 6 digits, and I don't have the balls or the gold nor the ABANDON to test this, but just the idea of permanently sprinting around strikes me as hilarious/fun. Night stalker could be dropped for steady aim, tactical advantage and archery would be musts however.

I thought it was worth talking about despite the fact that I will not do it, and I bet a bunch of people will walk away with this with the realization they get a few extra precious seconds from another lingering fog with +8 max disc anyhow but let me know what you think.

We all seem to be so wrapped up in how to kill things faster, and we should, just this could be another direction to shoot from heheh.

Everything seems to keep coming back to crit one way or another. I think that just goes to show how strong sharpshooter is for inferno entry level if nothing else, not that it isn't the best for end game damage builds too.

115% with a 50% chance for another 115% vs 155%... or if you run with devouring arrow a 35% chance of a massive followup attack.

Your hatred definitely drains faster the more ias you have lol. It'd probably be a hecka lot cheaper to just stack *mostly* mass dex on gear with crit damage and get a good weapon than grabbing various legendary IAS gear with lower dex and ten times the price tag if you're just entering into inferno later acts, wish I had known that sooner.


What's the effective damage difference between hungering arrow and nether tentacles btw, shouldn't they be similar on single target or no?

Quote from RaX

Very surprised at the XBow answers in this thread. I have been playing around in a spreadsheet with the bonuses you get from Archery and it is quite hard to find a practical stat allocation that shows XBows pulling ahead. For example, at 30% crit chance and 250% crit damage, bows are ahead by a fair margin. If you raise either crit value independently from this baseline, bow dps remains ahead of xbow dps. Only when you have a relatively high crit % chance and relatively low crit damage % do xbows pull ahead.

Furthermore, xbows are slow as ****. Good luck avoiding Belial claw void zones or mortar affix if you're in mid xbow cast. I still have trouble sometimes moving away in time with a bow and 2.7 APS.

Regarding stutter stepping, unless you are playing solo and kiting, I don't think this is an issue. From what I have seen in groups, you need a fast weapon for those "oh crap" moments when you need to stop holding/clicking your mouse button and move away asap. Your ability to do this with slow xbows is severely hampered.

Am I missing something here?

Yes. For those of us soloing, especially those of us undergeared, hitting elite packs extremely hard with opener damage is kind of useful.

2.4 is a bit slow for using a bow in end game isn't it? without ias on my chest, helm, bracers, AND neck i'm 2.40 equipping a bow that doesn't even have %ias on it, itself.

but you also want to blow the crap out of everything before it sneezes on you and you die, meaning the burst from crossbow opening fights up can be very useful, and bows aren't exactly consistent damage either, their min/max vary by several hundred so it's not much different from praying for crits after you've opened and depleted full stacked sharpshooter using a crossbow.

With all the IAS everyone stacks end game I'd be surprised if people could really stutter step a full IAS set of gear with a bow or hand crossbow set. You'd probably get yourself killed more than it would save you, having more mobility from quicker attacks.