30 replies to this topic

[Ming]

Hey guys.

I got bored of Archon and CM Twister/Comet builds. And to be honest those builds don't work that great with budget gear. So I came up with a build that I really like, I call it a "Laser Storm" build. I think this build is pretty good for farming XP on low Monster Power levels and it's even quite useful for medium MP settings. Couldn't test beyond MP5, because my gear isn't up to it. Anyway, I find it really good for "Alkaizer Runs".



Skills:

• Disintegrate (Chaos Nexus)
  
• Hydra (Arcane Hydra)
  
• Magic Weapon (Force Weapon)
  
• Frost Nova (Cold Snap)
  
• Diamond Skin (Crystal Shell)
  
• Storm Armor (Shocking Aspect)

Since you usually farm XP on low Monster Power it doesn't make almost any difference between Archon and Disintegrate. Monsters die just as fast. Except that Archon laser has less AOE and no utility spells like Frost Nova and Diamond Skin.

I decided to use Hydra instead of Archon. On low MP hydra can kill groups of monsters easy, which means I can run while Hydra kills and I get the XP. The other spell I use is Disintegrate, because I like to shoot lasers and it's quite decent AOE. I also use storm armor which adds some more AOE damage to this build.

So why I prefer this build over Archon or Critical Mass with Twister/Comet builds? It's less boring! Compared to Archon build, it gives me more survivability/utility in forms of Frost Nova and Diamond Skin spells. Disintegrate with Chaos Nexus rune has better AOE than Archon and Hydra can kill stuff while I run. And I don't have to worry about Archon running off. Oh, did I mention it's less boring than CM Twister spamming?

I just wish I had more time to play.

Here's my Diablo 3 profile.

Let me know what you think.

[Tesla]

Thanks. I will try it out. Maybe with teleport instead of hydra. But I always liked chaos nexus, partially because of the awesome visuals, especially if you are surrounded by enemies/containers ;-D

[Sophiemj]

Thank you very much I think now I can solve my wiz prob !

[Bagstone]

That looks extremely nice. I'm also looking for new alternatives right now and tried Disintegrate yesterday, but it seemed like you need insane APoC for that. You have 27 APoC, have you tried this build with with less? With my 19 APoC and 45% crit I just couldn't sustain Disintegrate like you do in the video... but I don't want to gimp my dps completely by buying yet another APoC piece (head).

[yellowcow]

point is he runs in mp0.

[Bagstone]

yellowcow, on 19 November 2012 - 09:51 AM, said:

point is he runs in mp0.

So what? Get a bit more DPS and EHP and you can use this build for higher MPs. His DPS is not that extremely high, and this is about an interesting build and thankfully not one of these boring, annoying "look at me and how awesome I am, facerolling MP8" posts.

Back to topic: did you try this in a group? Main reason I want an alternative to CMWW/Archon is that I find both not extremely useful in groups...

[Loroese]

Alternative to APoC is items with -AP cost of disintegrate, like SoJ. And how is CMWW not useful in groups?    Especially if you use the slow time with extra damage. Free 20% group dps plus chain frozen mobs. What's not to love? (besides the possible lag you cause them from spamming spells, heh)

Edited by Loroese, 19 November 2012 - 10:22 AM.

[Huminator]

Must hurt being a wiz and see sprint barb, tempest rush monks, acid rain witch doctors and vaulting dh's speeding throu the instances with constantly speed bonuses.. And then be stuck with a wizard which can't keep up. I mean a equal geared wizard is always like 20m xp/hour behind the other classes. Hopefully thats some blizzard will address at some point. Because its really unfair in my opinion.

[Bagstone]

Loroese, on 19 November 2012 - 10:21 AM, said:

And how is CMWW not useful in groups?    Especially if you use the slow time with extra damage. Free 20% group dps plus chain frozen mobs. What's not to love? (besides the possible lag you cause them from spamming spells, heh)

Yeah, CMWW can be extremely useful in groups - but imho only on higher MPs. On lower MPs (sometimes my friends just want to run on MP1 with low EHP gear and steamroll everything) mobs die too fast.

Huminator, on 19 November 2012 - 11:12 AM, said:

Must hurt being a wiz and see sprint barb, tempest rush monks, acid rain witch doctors and vaulting dh's speeding throu the instances with constantly speed bonuses.. And then be stuck with a wizard which can't keep up. I mean a equal geared wizard is always like 20m xp/hour behind the other classes. Hopefully thats some blizzard will address at some point. Because its really unfair in my opinion.

Basically, we could use Teleport to compensate for that (in addition with CM it works quite well to speed up runs). But yeah, I kind of agree that it isn't really the same like a sprinting barb.

Edited by Bagstone, 19 November 2012 - 11:50 AM.

[agadabagada]

storm armor +35% move speed when u take damage
archon + teleport
CM + evocation

with enough dps, ive found my archon wiz can cruise through mp0-2 at a good rate and is MUCH *&^@*(%#*(@%(*@#^ EASEIR THAN THE POS dh i tried to make. 99k dps dh vs 78k archon wiz. archn wiz is like a 7/10 for ez/speed.

forgot to quote the guy above saying wiz's are slowest and worst for farming.

Edited by agadabagada, 19 November 2012 - 11:58 AM.

[Ming]

Bagstone, on 19 November 2012 - 09:30 AM, said:

That looks extremely nice. I'm also looking for new alternatives right now and tried Disintegrate yesterday, but it seemed like you need insane APoC for that. You have 27 APoC, have you tried this build with with less? With my 19 APoC and 45% crit I just couldn't sustain Disintegrate like you do in the video... but I don't want to gimp my dps completely by buying yet another APoC piece (head).

I have actually not tried it with less APoC, but I guess it would not work as well.

Bagstone, on 19 November 2012 - 09:58 AM, said:

did you try this in a group? Main reason I want an alternative to CMWW/Archon is that I find both not extremely useful in groups...

I tried it in a group on MP3, it works nice. I guess it also depends what group you are in, I mean with what classes.

agadabagada, on 19 November 2012 - 11:57 AM, said:

storm armor +35% move speed when u take damage

Yes, storm armor with move speed works great on this build. I swapped the runes today and am using the move speed rune. It's awesome.

[Huminator]

agadabagada, on 19 November 2012 - 11:57 AM, said:

storm armor +35% move speed when u take damage
forgot to quote the guy above saying wiz's are slowest and worst for farming.

Storm Armor can gives 25%, not 35% movement speed for 3 seconds when hit by a melee or ranged attack. You can hardly compare that to endless tempest rush(monks), endless sprint(barbs), Spirit walk and horify-stalker without cooldown(Witch Doctors), endless vault(dh).

Wizard are currently the class, whos slowest at farming. We are talking 20 m/xp hour compared to other classes, which in my book is alot. The movement speed you gain from taking damage helps, but compared to the tools of other classes. Its meh and miles behind. Hopefully its an issue blizzard will address in a future patch.

Edited by Huminator, 19 November 2012 - 12:52 PM.

[DisposableHeero]

Disintegrate Cost Reduction gear, Diamond Skin (Prism), Storm Armor (Power of the Storm), using the slightly higher proc coefficient runes (Entropy and Intensify), Familiar (Arcanot), and Magic Weapon (Conduit) in roughly that order will reduce the channeling costs of disintegrate and make this build stable with less APoC.

Disintegrate Cost Reduction Affix appears on Rare Helms (up to -5 cost), Stone of Jordan (up to -5 cost), Skull Grasp (up to -4 Cost), and Mara's Kaleidoscope (up to -5 cost), meaning you can actually completely zero the cost of disintegrate from just gear.

Disintegrate is pulse rate 3, meaning it pulses three packets of damage per time it charges the arcane power cost, and has a proc coefficient of 0.167 (no runes, entropy, or intensify), 0.111 (convergence or chaos nexus), or 0.125 (volatility).

Disintegrate Cost * attack speed - coefficient * crit chance * 3 * APoC = AP deficit, which becomes infinitely sustainable when the AP deficit is less than your AP regeneration (10 + 2 for astral presence + 2 Arcanot + 0.5 Templar + 2 4pc Tal'rasha).  I'm going Eyebal and guess that the build is fine for low monster power as long as its AP deficit after accounting for regen is less than 10 (for 12ish seconds of channeling uninterrupted) then the build is sustainable.

The OP's profile shows the following:
41.5% Crit Chance
1.68 attacks per second
27 APoC
0 Disintegrate Cost Reduction
Chaos Nexus, Astral Presence, Templar

Coefficiet is 0.111, AP Regen is 12.5 per second

18 * 1.68 - 0.111 * 0.415 * 3 * 27 = AP deficit = 26.5, which actually gives an adjusted deficit of 14 AP per second, meaning 8-9 seconds continuous channeling before AP runs out.

So lets generalize this formula for a second to see if we can determine some the value of some of our various ways to offset the channel cost:

The coefficient for Chaos Nexus is 1/9, and intensify which would be my choice is 1/6.  If we assume a 1.0 attack speed and 50% crit chance for a second we see that our formula becomes:

(18 - cost reduction) * 1 - (1/9)*(0.5)*3*APoC = AP deficit for chaos nexus.  This tells us that APoC in this case has 1/6th the value of cost reduction.  Adding attack speed increases this ratio in favor of cost reduction.  6 APoC is also worth 1 AP regen in the overall result here.  Intuitively we see that attack speed will not change the relative value of APoC or AP regen, but will increase the value of cost reduction.

If we switch to Intensify, the value of APoC increases by 50%, meaning switching to intensify allows you to drop 1/3rd of your APoC without a noticable difference, i.e. going from three sources to two.  Each 1 point of disintegrate cost reduction equates to 6 * attack speed points of APoC for Chaos Nexus and 4 * attack speed points of APoC for Intensify.

This means if the OP were to change Storm Armor (Shocking Aspect) to Storm Armor (Power of the Storm) he would be able to drop 2 of his 3 APoC sources without reducing his AP efficiency.  If he were to swap one of his rings for a -5 Disintegrate Cost Stone of Jordan as well, he could drop APoC entirely without affecting the builds performance, and swaping his DS rune to Prism would have a similar effect.

Edited by DisposableHeero, 19 November 2012 - 03:01 PM.

[JKlimek]

I can't help you much on boring, but if you do the right areas, you can archon on a budget just fine.  Especially now with the AH floor dropping out.  I did Act 3 farming pre 1.0.5 on probably <3M gear with about 40k dps.  You obviously can't do the whole act, but you can do the two arreat areas and the whole depths.  In the fields there are usually two dungeons with the same style as the depths.  It's probably not as efficient as Alkaiser's, but you gotta get started somewhere.

Your build looks really fun as something different tho, I will definitely try this later tonight.

[Jaetch]

Huminator, on 19 November 2012 - 11:12 AM, said:

Must hurt being a wiz and see sprint barb, tempest rush monks, acid rain witch doctors and vaulting dh's speeding throu the instances with constantly speed bonuses.. And then be stuck with a wizard which can't keep up. I mean a equal geared wizard is always like 20m xp/hour behind the other classes. Hopefully thats some blizzard will address at some point. Because its really unfair in my opinion.

You have no idea how many WW barbs and Tempest Rush monks I leave behind in the dust because I kill everything before they can touch anything and starve them of their resources   25% move speed while using Teleport Archon sure helps.

Quite amusing to see barbs chugging along behind me because they have no fury to Sprint and monks have no spirit to channel Tempest Rush. Legacy Nat's Vault-Tactical Advantage DHs are a little different, but usually I always catch up to them running in circles and kiting. They're essentially my personal scouts.

Edited by Jaetch, 19 November 2012 - 08:18 PM.

[Huminator]

Jaetch, on 19 November 2012 - 08:16 PM, said:

Huminator, on 19 November 2012 - 11:12 AM, said:

Must hurt being a wiz and see sprint barb, tempest rush monks, acid rain witch doctors and vaulting dh's speeding throu the instances with constantly speed bonuses.. And then be stuck with a wizard which can't keep up. I mean a equal geared wizard is always like 20m xp/hour behind the other classes. Hopefully thats some blizzard will address at some point. Because its really unfair in my opinion.

You have no idea how many WW barbs and Tempest Rush monks I leave behind in the dust because I kill everything before they can touch anything and starve them of their resources   25% move speed while using Teleport Archon sure helps.

Quite amusing to see barbs chugging along behind me because they have no fury to Sprint and monks have no spirit to channel Tempest Rush. Legacy Nat's Vault-Tactical Advantage DHs are a little different, but usually I always catch up to them running in circles and kiting. They're essentially my personal scouts.

Uhm, maybe you should try playing with people who use a keyboard then. Because if what you wrote should be true, it can only be friends of yours who only play with mouse.

[Jaetch]

Huminator, on 19 November 2012 - 08:58 PM, said:

Jaetch, on 19 November 2012 - 08:16 PM, said:

Huminator, on 19 November 2012 - 11:12 AM, said:

Must hurt being a wiz and see sprint barb, tempest rush monks, acid rain witch doctors and vaulting dh's speeding throu the instances with constantly speed bonuses.. And then be stuck with a wizard which can't keep up. I mean a equal geared wizard is always like 20m xp/hour behind the other classes. Hopefully thats some blizzard will address at some point. Because its really unfair in my opinion.

You have no idea how many WW barbs and Tempest Rush monks I leave behind in the dust because I kill everything before they can touch anything and starve them of their resources   25% move speed while using Teleport Archon sure helps.

Quite amusing to see barbs chugging along behind me because they have no fury to Sprint and monks have no spirit to channel Tempest Rush. Legacy Nat's Vault-Tactical Advantage DHs are a little different, but usually I always catch up to them running in circles and kiting. They're essentially my personal scouts.

Uhm, maybe you should try playing with people who use a keyboard then. Because if what you wrote should be true, it can only be friends of yours who only play with mouse.

Trust me, if you're a wizard running 25% move speed and some form of Teleport, it's not that hard to keep up (even easier with Scramble Storm Armor). That is unless you don't have the DPS to one-shot mobs (for most people that would be MP0-3). If you do, you get to keep Archon up indefinitely and the WW barb won't be able to hit enough things with Sprint nados and keep his fury up. That's why I rarely run Archon wizard with WW barbs or TR monks because it's counter-productive. I have to kill everything ASAP while they have to make sure things stay alive long enough to provide resource generation.

And FYI, most 100K-150K DPS max-MS Archon wizards on MP1 can average at least 35-40M EXP (ruby and either Leoric's or Hellfire Ring) per hour on standard Alkaizer runs. But you do say it's unfair for wizards to be lagging behind. I will welcome the speed buffs!

Edited by Jaetch, 19 November 2012 - 09:59 PM.

[Huminator]

35-40 million. You do realise thats around HALF of what the other classes can do. Who cares if your archon got 100% uptime, you still move like a snail. Your xp gain per hour only confirms it.

Edited by Huminator, 19 November 2012 - 11:12 PM.

[Jaetch]

Huminator, on 19 November 2012 - 11:09 PM, said:

35-40 million. You do realise thats around HALF of what the other classes can do. Who cares if your archon got 100% uptime, you still move like a snail. Your xp gain per hour only confirms it.

1. You said wizards cannot keep up, which isn't true.

2. You said the people I play with don't use keyboards, which for their sake I hope isn't true.

3. 35-40M is what Archon wizards get with average stats and on MP1. 35-40M is also what other classes get with average stats and on low MP. The 50-70M EXP per hour rates are for above average geared characters that can fly through MP3+ without breaking a sweat.

Yes, WW barbs are fast. There are more softcore paragon 100 barbs worldwide than paragon 100 DHs, WDs, and wizards combined. (FYI, there are more paragon 100 wizards than DHs and WDs). That's not saying wizards can't keep up with the other classes. That's saying WW barbs are just more efficient at leveling (don't get me started on WW barbs being unable to slow down to pick up potentially good rares).

I'm pointing out that while wizards may lack easy single-click raw speed like other classes (Sprint barb, TR monk, SW WD, Vault-Tactical Adv. DH), they can still keep up with base run speed and abilities like Teleport-Wormhole-Illusionist. It's not imbalanced. It's called class diversity. I would love wizards to fly through the map without a care in the world. But I don't see that happening anytime soon and I don't see a problem with that.

Edited by Jaetch, 19 November 2012 - 11:39 PM.

[Bagstone]

35-40m is the minimum dps if you're moving without teleport archon rune, 100k dps (equivalent of 3m budget gear) and really really casual gameplay. He was giving a very low estimate.

Wizards aren't that much slower than other classes. Put in scramble rune, 24% MS, Archon and you're just as quick as any other class. And with decent gear, 70m or even more are no problem for wizards (remember, 100k is the budget dps, look at what Jaetch pulls off).