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Quote from Silvach

Revenge is not enough to suistane A3 without problems. Either you go S&B with Revenge or you go DW with some speedups like WW/tornados and stack life on hit. You can also go 2h and lifesteal or DW high dps (1000+ weps) with lifesteal instead of loh.

Change overpower to "ignore pain" or "charge" if you want to keep it that way. Charge with 8% heal and ignore with 20%lifesteal. You need some suistan. HARD.

Quote from Loroese

Quote from Kshatriya

Quote from Loroese

Quote from Kshatriya

Hello,

First of all great post!

What i am interested in is, why not use familiar with sprk flint instead of a venom hydra?
You then will do extra dps and u don't have to pop the hydra all the time.

That depends what build you're asking about. If you're working on progression with a kiting build, hydra is more or less essential because of its high damage per cast. It allows you to drop it and focus more on not getting attacked then having to worry about weaving in extra spells to do damage. Granted you'll likely be doing that anyway but if you're kiting in a small enough area that the hydra has close to 100% uptime on what you're kiting, the damage per cast is amazing. On bosses, it will increase your damage output by far more than the 12% the sparkflint will do because of that high damage per cast.

I am reffering to the blizzard kiting build, the 1st build he is talking about in his post.
Mobs do get slowed, but i feel i still have to run a lot around and sometimes i hardly get time to spam piercing orb to some damage.
Atm i have buffed around 24k dps and 25k hp

The reason hydra is a staple in the build is you can toss a blizzard then toss the hydra and while you're running away the hydra is still doing damage. Without hydra you do very little damage as you're kiting and instead are reliant on stopping to cast more piercing orbs, which raises risk of mobs catching up or getting into teleport/vortex range, etc. It is also my experience with fast mobs that I tend to spend a lot of time running so being able to just drop a hydra somewhere is much easier to manage on the fly then aiming an orb at the mobs chasing me.

Also regarding bosses, you might find the enrage timers even more strict if you drop hydra because it does so much damage. When I first got past Act 1 and decided to try some farming, I was easily able to kill Butcher before the enrage with the kiting build. Then I tried changing out Hydra for Magic Weapon to see if it made farming any easier. It did, sort of, but when I got to Butcher, I couldn't beat his enrage anymore and had to reset my skills to kill him. Granted, I only had around 20k dps or so at the time, but it can't really be stressed enough how much damage that hydra can do, especially if you don't greatly outgear the content. I dropped it in my arcane orb spec for Act 1 farming (45k dps in MF gear), but if I go back to Act 3 farming I would likely put hydra back into my spec.

Still, feel free to try it yourself if you haven't already.

Quote from GalZohar

You really should experiment with critical mass build, it is clearly the 2nd most overpowered build in the game right now, with the first being the sprint barb (check kripp's videos for it).

Here's a part of a run I did with this build in act 2:

Of course act 3 is perfectly do-able, but some rare elite packs are incredibly annoying. Not that I have to skip any, but dying 2-3 times on such a pack and having 1-3 such packs in a run can be very time consuming when you have to run back at them from the checkpoint. After some gear upgrades I managed to get the number of annoying elite packs down enough so that I can clear it in 2-3 hours, which I think makes it more worthwhile than the 90-100 minutes it normally takes to clear act 2. Clearing all zones and dungeons of all elites of course, to minimize the need to create new games and lose valor buffs.

Of course, until you have good enough crit and AP on crit (which you should really get even if you're playing low budget due to how overpowered this build is, just sacrifice as much damage as you have to in order to get it to fit in your budget), I think bliz/hydra is the best because it can simply avoid just about anything deadly while slowly picking at it until it dies. But again, I doubt you can't gear a critical mass wizard at least for act 1 farming with only 700k gold (which is about what you should have when you hit 60 for the first time).

Quote from Loroese

Quote from Kshatriya

Hello,

First of all great post!

What i am interested in is, why not use familiar with sprk flint instead of a venom hydra?
You then will do extra dps and u don't have to pop the hydra all the time.

That depends what build you're asking about. If you're working on progression with a kiting build, hydra is more or less essential because of its high damage per cast. It allows you to drop it and focus more on not getting attacked then having to worry about weaving in extra spells to do damage. Granted you'll likely be doing that anyway but if you're kiting in a small enough area that the hydra has close to 100% uptime on what you're kiting, the damage per cast is amazing. On bosses, it will increase your damage output by far more than the 12% the sparkflint will do because of that high damage per cast.