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Build Guide

• Tal Rasha 4 pc, while not mandatory, does provide additional damage with meteors for each element you use. Whether the enemy is hit by the initial spell or simply stands in the AoE after, it becomes exposed. After 2.1, this set provides much more damage to the fight, especially if you are arcane.
• Thunderfury is recommended to provide bonus lightning damage and a free chain lightning attack that procs very frequently. If you are not using a frost spell, it also supplements for parlysis by randomly zapping enemies in combat.
• Mirrorball is obviously required in order to cast more than one missile per swing. It also provides bonus cooldown reduction to help out for Black Hole or other CDs you might want to try out.
• Ring of Royal Grandeur is the glue that holds this build together. With three different sets in mind, it's practically a must.
• Aughild's is not entirely required, but it does provide bonus defense and elite damage.
• Firebird is recommended for the 2 pc Int bonus (+500) and the 4 pc bonus that will revive you from a fatal attack. Be weary that if you are low health and attempt to "speed chug" a potion before death, the timing can be poor. Should you die, your screen will gray out for a couple seconds as the meteor animation takes place. During this time, you can drink a potion, but it will be wasted since you heal to full regardless.
• Amulets: I have Moonlight Ward listed since I was an arcane wiz for the longest time. However, it's hard to do arcane missiles on T6 due to the lack of pierce or splash damage. Still, it is a strong neck to have, and it provides little arcane wards that explode when enemies are too close. The bonus arcane damage can also help for your Cannoneer Familiar.
The exception to wearing this is if you are lucky enough to get The Witching Hour belt and must wear the Tal Rasha neck to maintain 4 pc.

• Storm Crow / Magistrate Helms: These are recommended based on other ideas for the build.These two items are wizard hats and can provide bonus power on crit. It is possible to have both crit and a socket, but rolls vary.
Storm Crow provides bonus lightning and casts an orb at random. The bonus lightning will largely help your passive damage (Thunderfury, Storm Armor, Electrify).

The Magistrate is intended for hydra wizards, specifically frost. With this, your frost hydra will cast frost nova. It is not very dependable, as it casts once every few seconds, but it does add stun utility when the timing is right.

If used to initiate, this is a great way to clump enemies together and burst them down. Ideally, Black Hole is cast while your Tal Rasha meteors are available. You could potentially set all four meteors off in about the time it takes to cast Black Hole and swing once. When done right, it is amazing 2-second burst to do on a group. The Spellsteal rune is better suited for offensive play since you are no longer prioritizing around elite abilities.

If used for utility, it's a judgment call on what to use it for. I will have a section later about Event Horizon and how to fairly prioritize the fight.

• Magic Missile is the focal point of this build.


Arcane: I recommend Seeker > Charged Blast > Split simply due to accuracy. Unless Seekers constantly auto aim into a wall, they are the only missile attack that hits with all 3 guaranteed. In the fray of combat, their auto aim can aid you in focusing more on the elites and what they may do next rather than how accurate your shots were. They are also stronger than cold or fire missiles, but they do not pierce or do major splash damage. This is often, but not always, the element I use in group play so I can focus on enemy abilities.

Cold: Glacial Spike is your only choice, but it's a good spell to use. Each spike deals splash damage as well as freezes each enemy hit. With a 5 second window, you may want paralysis to provide stuns between the freezes. Diminishing returns can occur, but they always reset sooner or later.

Fire: Conflag is some people's bread and butter. It pierces through enemies AND provides a small fire dot. After 2.1, this no longer stacks indefinitely, but when combined with the Firebird 6 pc it has extremely strong ramp up.

• Secondary spells are always up to personal play and are situational:
Storm Chaser is a personal favorite since I can cast twisters AND charge up a lightning ball that pierces targets. Some times, this spell alone helped supplement my arcane missiles for hitting multiple targets. However, twisters are sporadic and not entirely reliable on damage. I would still recommend this for any build with a signature spell that wants to also play around with paralysis.

Hydra is another personal favorite of mine, especially for my exposure build. There is at least one rune for every element and it can help either provide a new element for exposure or simply add more passive turret damage. Its damage output is consistent, but not the strongest spell to use.

Serpent's Sparker is a new wand that allows you to summon another Hydra. This, combined with Tasker & Theo, can make for a nice combo to aid in your missile spam fest.

Wave of Force / Blizzard / Meteor can help provide additional aoe. These are the sort of spells I swap to during cursed events since their aoe is stronger and more dictated by you rather than relying on procs. However, they are also very power hungry, and you may not have enough when it is needed most. Resource gear and arcane regen obviously help if you are more keen to these spells.

Archon: This spell is especially strong in packs, elites, and cursed events, but since it no longer adds duration per kill, it has limited potential until you get a very high amount of CDR.

• Familiar, Magic Weapon, and Armor Choice:
Familiar is not entirely necessary, but it provides additional passive damage per swing and a unique ability with each rune.

provides fire and bonus damage, and in most cases tends to be the recommended rune. Even if your familiar misses, you still have 10% bonus damage.

Lately, I've been playing with

to provide arcane as well as a small burst to help with packs. The explosion range is small, but the damage adds up. It is especially good when combined with Black Hole.

Magic Weapon is entirely personal choice.

When using paralysis, I sometimes use Electrify to further add to my Storm Armor and Thunderfury procs. It is a small hit, but it is a cleave and helps for tight packs.

With the buff to Ignite, that has become my main choice to a) proc fire meteors, provide some amount of DoT when combined with seeker's high damage hits. The duration is short, but it stacks.

I would mainly recommend deflection to help out against reflect packs or if you are simply not tanky enough for a certain difficulty. With Prismatic Armor, you can sustain most hits without worrying too much about shield stacking.

Force Weapon is 20% bonus damage instead of the usual 10, and I would recommend this if you don't plan on a full exposure build.

Armor is also entirely a personal choice, each with its own purpose.

My main armor is Storm Armor: Shocking Aspect. This provides bonus cleave when you crit along with the static (forgive the pun) damage from your armor buff. It is the least defensive, though, so be careful.

Ice Armor: Frozen Storm can provide a small amount of damage to enemies around you, slow them, AND trigger the cold portion of exposure. When it is your only source of cold, it also triggers the meteor in a more reliable fashion by hitting those closest to you.

Prismatic Armor is the main rune I recommend for Energy Armor. Force Armor can help with major spikes, but that has not been too frequent of an occurrence for me. Simply use Prismatic, boost both armor and resist, and be happy.

• Evocation to aid in Black Hole use. Certain abilities happen quicker than others and the sooner you can prevent them, the better.

• Galvanizing Ward provides a consistent bubble to mitigate damage. When used with deflection, you can sometimes maintain your bubble the entire fight. Ideally, if you don't lose your bubble at all within a 5 second period, Galv Ward will refresh automatically. This is usually not possible on T6, but it can happen.
• Paralysis has a chance to stun with lightning damage. This would be my third "mandatory" passive if you aren't using Glacial Spike, since you would need some kind of stun control.
• Prodigy helps greatly for any of the high power spells like Energy Twister or Meteor. With Storm Chaser, it helps to cast more twisters and lightning balls via sig spell.
• Arcane Dynamo is amazing for anyone who wants their secondary to be one big hit. After 2.1, they now buff hydras. :3
Dynamo is no longer triggered by your Tal Rasha meteors.

Black Hole also uses Dynamo.

• Power Hungry can be great if you ever want to save up for a big burst, but it is entirely dependent on health globe drops. Recasting your buffs (armor, magic weapon, familiar) also use stacks from this passive. The overall usefulness may vary, but played properly it is amazing.

• Frozen Pulse tends to be top on my list. It hurts, it slows, it's often under your feet before you even notice it. Arcane sentries may also be inconvenient, but they are easier to avoid, whereas a pulse may tick right in the middle of a hallway since the pulse stops where you last stood.
• Waller & Frozen are pretty close second. If you have a pack that has both, save it for Frozen in case you are walled shortly before the orbs appear. It also depends on how much space you have to run around. Some times I simply get rid of waller so I can go back to dpsing the elites.
• Arcane sentries are third. Certain packs will have several minions and thus an entire floor of pretty purple death lasers. If vortex is also in the mix, it would be wise to vacuum the sentries closer to the elites than yourself since you could be dragged in any time.
• Poison can sometimes split up the party, but it's usually avoidable. If there is not much danger, you can cast near the elite pack and get both them and most of the poison.
• Molten explosions can deal massive damage, but unless you get vortexed in (or pay ZERO attention to what's going on) you can avoid it. With that in mind, one thing I love to do is pre-cast black hole shortly before they die, deal damage to the enemies, and it will also vacuum up the molten explosion. However, be safe around vortex packs and try to save it more for when the explosion shows up.
• Electrified hurts, and when enemies near death it becomes worse. Still, it's constantly occurring in the fight and should be only be vacuumed in tandem with another ability or for emergencies (getting swarmed).
• Fire Chains are extremely nasty, but like Electrified it should not be the purpose of casting Black Hole unless it's an emergency.
• Orbiter is more pretty than threatening, unless you get jailed next to one. Just pay attention to the way it rotates and avoid.
• Desecrate is pretty self-explanatory.

• Certain abilities, like Electrified, Molten (the explosion), Poison, and Waller are very easy to manipulate and simply need a little touch.
• Arcane, Desecrate, Frozen, Orbiter, and Frozen Pulse, however, will need you to cast fairly centered on the ability itself.
Be aware that casting Black Hole on a moving Frozen Pulse does not always catch it; most of the time, you will need to wait for it to be stationary.

If you want to use Black Hole on Orbiter, cast it on the giant orb itself to eliminate the smaller orbs.