13 replies to this topic

[Nellys]

Hello everyone! I've put a lot of time and effort into my wizard, but compared to the rest I feel that he's somewhat low on "Damage" (69k~ UB)

I know that my crit chance is somewhat low to run a CM efficiently, but I plow through MP5 easily, farm keys without dying and doing uber bosses with ease, all of which solo on MP5.

What I am wondering is: Are there any relatively cheap (< 10ish mill) investments I could do that would significantly boost my numbers -without- sacrificing too much defense? The few times the ice break I'm quite squishy and feel that going with any less VIT/All ress wouldn't be beneficial  almost no matter how much damage I'd gain.

en/profile/Nellys-2932/hero/2834530

Nellys#2932

Thanks a bunch for your time and thoughts <3

Edited by Nellys, 06 December 2012 - 10:58 PM.

[Junotekh]

http://eu.battle.net...32/hero/2834530

There you go.
Unfortunately I don't know shit about CM wizards, I'm running archon

[Nellys]

Thank you very much for the link to my toon! Click Junotekh's link for those interested in aiding me

[Orb]

I am no CM wiz myself but I feel your off-hand raw dmg is too low. (Your MH is fast, so the raw dmg on OH gives lots of dps). Maybe you can try non-set OH with cc and apoc if you are under budget.

Also, your vit seems low, so your %life on legs and amy seems wasted. Maybe you can try using rare legs (200 int 200vit socket included+allres) and rare amy (just vit loh and 2 of the trifecta stats) may be cheaper?

[Loroese]

A couple quick fixes is to switch from Energy Armor to Storm Armor - Shocking Aspect. That should raise your effective dps by 20-30% at the cost of a bit of EHP, but I think your EHP is fine for MP5 with storm armor. You can also try swapping from Crystal shell to Diamond shards rune on DS for another 5-15% dps gain, again at the cost of some effective mitigation.

Beyond that you want to raise your IAS to increase both your effective dps and char sheet dps. Unfortunatelly, to do that you'll either need to drop crit damage (which will probably lower your char sheet dps) or pay through the roof for trifecta rings and gloves. I also recommend getting 5-10% more crit chance if you can. I find the nat's 2pc (ring+boots) to be very helpful because of the crit set bonus and base IAS on the ring, but I don't know what it will cost on EU AH.

Another option for raising APS is swapping to an IAS Chanto's wand, since your 1 random affix is a mesely 29 bonus damage. I don't know the costs though, and I imagine a high dps version will cost more than your budget, but I'm not sure.


General guidelines for CM gearing: Start with high Armor and Resists, and crit% around 40 with 20-30 APoC, and ignore crit damage on gear (except maybe weapon). Then raise IAS and DPS to reach 2.5 APS breakpoint so you can drop to 20 or so APoC. Next aim for 45-50% crit and 2.73 APS breakpoint. Final targets are around 5000 armor, 800 resists, 30-40k hp, 2.73 APS, 18-20 APoC, 50%+crit for MP10 farming, based on the posters on the official forums. I think they recommend 800 LoH per 100k dps, so 800-900 LoH is a good amount to keep until you really start pushing your dps.

When you have the higher armor and resists and are at the 2.73 breakpoint, you can start adding crit damage to push dps higher. That's about where I'm at now but on US AH the upgrades are getting pretty pricey.

Also for reference: the 2.73 breakpoint is mostly used for permafreezing the uber bosses, in particular you can permafreeze SB+Keule so that K doesn't teleport or drop any slow bubbles. Some people need to reach the 3.0 breakpoint for that. I haven't tried with 2.73 since I just got there and haven't had time to play lately, but maybe I'll have time to play with it over the weekend. Lower APS works fine for the build, but higher APS gives better freezing uptime and actually lowers the required EHP by a bit because you get significantly higher LoH returns and higher refresh rate on DS.

[Loroese]

Orb, on 06 December 2012 - 11:21 PM, said:

I am no CM wiz myself but I feel your off-hand raw dmg is too low. (Your MH is fast, so the raw dmg on OH gives lots of dps). Maybe you can try non-set OH with cc and apoc if you are under budget.

Also, your vit seems low, so your %life on legs and amy seems wasted. Maybe you can try using rare legs (200 int 200vit socket included+allres) and rare amy (just vit loh and 2 of the trifecta stats) may be cheaper?

A higher damage OH with APoC will cost him a ton if he wants to keep the IAS from the Chant, so I'd say keep the OH and look elsewhere. I'd also keep the pants because the LoH is very useful, and his HP are pretty good for CM. More hp is mostly wasted because of the use of DS, less HP is dangerous because you lose some of your buffer between DS refreshes. Right now the best defensive gearing strat is to maintain around that hp level and raise Armor and Resistances to increase damage reduction.

A swap to an Andy's visage might work if the loss of EHP doesn't hurt farming. Or Mempo (with Armor or extra int/vit) might give a dps increase while converting a bit of HP to damage reduction. I got a mempo for under 2 mil with 170+int, 9%IAS, 650+ armor, plus the base life% and socket, but that was on the US AH. You can also swap in a +life% gem in the helm if you need a bit more EHP, though for MP5 farming you don't really need a lot of EHP (I run with 290 EHP on MP7 with 36k HP, though I often use Crystal Shell instead of Diamond Skin because I hate reflect + eletcricity), I'd say around 220k-250k EHP should be plenty for MP5.

[Shinna1989]

For a 10mil budget things i would change:

- Better gloves

Some with 10% crit chance and 9ias and as much int for your budget. I bought some today with 99int, some vit and 10% cc + 9% ias for 350k on eu ah.

- Cheap ias mempo

Since you have like 1k loh just from blackthorn pants and amu i  would switch to a cheap int mempo. Its another 9% ias and a shitload of all res and int. And the %life roll on mempo equals the vit on stormcrow.

- Source

I would switch the chanto for an oculus. One with decent avg(~220), 6% bonus vs. elites and 10 apoc/10% crit and vit roll should be like 4mil.


Overall you will spend way less then 10mil and gettin more dmg, higher resist, some ias and crit chance for loosing ~400loh and 7 apoc which is a fair trade for me.

[Nellys]

I'll look into all your suggestions, thank you very much!

Are there any way to preview sheet DPS before spending millions on the item?

Edit: I replaced my gloves. I ended up losing 2k sheet DPS, but the gain in All res / Vit  / Crit% / Atk% was too hard to pass on.

Edit's edit: Got a mempo too, losing the APOC/LoH went just fine, thank you very much for that suggestion!

Also changed my Vile Ward to a piece with vitality, raised my HP quite a bit too.

I feel very uneasy about replacing the source as I have no idea whether or not it's a sheet gain or loss DPS (I mostly care about this because groups has the tendency of denying/ridiculing low sheet DPS players)

Edited by Nellys, 07 December 2012 - 07:29 AM.

[Bagstone]

Nellys, on 07 December 2012 - 06:44 AM, said:

Are there any way to preview sheet DPS before spending millions on the item?

[...]

I feel very uneasy about replacing the source as I have no idea whether or not it's a sheet gain or loss DPS (I mostly care about this because groups has the tendency of denying/ridiculing low sheet DPS players)

For quick comparison when buying items on the AH, use d3up.com (create account, import profile, download tool from d3bit.com, start D3 in windowed fullscreen mode, hit F12 on tooltip hover and you get a quick comparison). For overall character planning, use Loroese's spreadsheet (link in his sig).

I'd stick to Chantos offhand, too - the IAS is just too nice to give up. Also, the set bonus is quite awesome and often overlooked (D3up scan does not include it, you have to manually add 130 int before analyzing) and the -7% elite damage are just huge!

[Nellys]

Thanks a bunch! I'll give those sites a peek after college no doubt

Also some updates about current problems with boosting "Damage/DPS" further:

The neck and legs are definitely bottle necks: But they are also the only LoH I got and got a really nice vitality set bonus
Main Hand/Off Hand: Chantodo's set bonus is both an immense boost to defense and attack. Replacing either piece would need to give a raw improvement of 130+ int (for breaking the set) and then further improvements to make it worth it in the first place (That would also give 15~ APOC combined)

However: I managed to boost both my vitality and all res, as well as atk%. I feel as if "Crit Damage" is something I'm somewhat starved of now

Maybe I could get some huge int boosting legs, find a neck with atk%, crit%, LoH and then replace a ring and find something with LoH. Thoughts? (2nd ring slot is reserved for hellfire =) )

I'm thankful for any further advice, tips or suggestions!

Edited by Nellys, 07 December 2012 - 09:46 AM.

[Nellys]

Made my goal of 100k dps today (With Magic Weapon)
(And with it 41k HP, 600 All res, 1000 LoH, 2.31 atk%, 42% crit, 200% crit dmg)
Does passives like Magic Weapon, and Glass canon count as "buffs" when people post their "unbuffed" DPS?

Thanks for all the support I've gotten here, it truly helped me quite a lot

Next goal!: 100k Sheet dps without magic weapon

Neck (Got 3 set of Blackthrone's now) and Pareto-improving the off hand next

Edited by Nellys, 09 December 2012 - 08:25 AM.

[Loroese]

Grats. I just hit 100k today without any buffs thanks to an extra 100 mil from some bracers I finally sold. I'm at 2.75 APS and just over 1k LoH.

As far as the buffs go, they're usually considered buffs, though they're active all the time. Honestly it shouldn't matter much if you say unbuffed or buffed dps, imo, since most of your actual dps depends more on the build used. For example, with the SNS build, I do about 600k dps. If I drop to Energy Armor, I only do about 400k. Either way my char sheet still shows 100k.

[Nellys]

Loroese, on 09 December 2012 - 08:48 AM, said:

As far as the buffs go, they're usually considered buffs, though they're active all the time. Honestly it shouldn't matter much if you say unbuffed or buffed dps, imo, since most of your actual dps depends more on the build used. For example, with the SNS build, I do about 600k dps. If I drop to Energy Armor, I only do about 400k. Either way my char sheet still shows 100k.

Oh for sure, I know that it doesn't "matter" in a personal sense. However when grouping up people -always- use sheet DPS as a tool of comparison whether you're welcome in their group or not, usually based on a quick "View hero" (accordingly to my experience). Getting declined to ubers/key runs on a high MP because "your DPS is too low" is my main motivation to even look at sheet dps

Though thank you!

Edit: Also doing my key runs on MP6 now, but ubers on 5 due to a certain pesky uber mage who loves his Slow time spell.

Edit's edit: >.< oh and gratz on selling the bracers for an immense amount of money and an increase to your dps!

Edited by Nellys, 09 December 2012 - 09:07 AM.

[Nellys]

Final goal reached =) 100k sheet dps with 45k~health, 700~all ress, 2.32 attack speed, 48~ crit (but sub 200 crit dmg) WITH Hellfire ring =D

Got really lucky on my 2nd goal: Socket, all ress and crit chance

Again, thanks a bunch for all the help you all - truly appreciated

Edited by Nellys, 10 December 2012 - 09:35 AM.