I just passed act2 with twister/cm build and didn't had a real problem after some gear upgrades. Even the first 2 parts of act3 (5/5 signal fires + 3/3 catapults) were going pretty smooth until I've met my first group of rippers (fast,molten,extra health....) and I have 0 chance to kill em
What I'm thinking is happening is you have found a mob that hits hard enough that your force armor rune can't reduce it enough anymore. You will find alot more from now on.
So you'll have to switch strategies to having Resist All gear. And using Prismatic armor rune instead.
Also you could probably switch glass cannon to cold blooded, for 20% more damage at no cost, instead of 15% but costs armor and resist.
The wording on it is wrong, it increases all damage, not just cold damage.
Diamond skin is affected by your mitigation, so the more armor and resists you have, the more damage your skin will be able to take before breaking. Avoidance too, but it's not as big of a priority.
Also, another good option for increasing your defense is surprisingly changing the frost nova rune to reduce the cooldown, It doesn't immediately seem like a good idea since cooldowns are already so short with critical mass. But it makes a huge difference in the first 6 seconds of combat, which is the scariest time for a wind-up Wizard.
And eventually getting a hat and weapon for arcane power on crit will let you switch astral presence to Evocation, which again is basically like saying 15% more defence and 15% more damage, since it directly affects how mony explosions you have going off simultaneously, as well as the percentage of the time that the mobs spend frozen by frost nova and thus unable to attack you. And gets you a re-proc of diamond skin sooner.
I've actually managed a profitable run of act 3/4 with no vitality... I don't recommend it, but that gives you an idea of how important it is as a stat... you basically only need as much as your mitigation/avoidance and reliability to keep them frozen dictates... if they never clear through your diamond skin, your health doesn't matter.
Though with the patch coming in a couple days now, I expect more vitality to be necessary soon, Like... more than 0. Not sure exactly how hard the wicked wind nerf is actually going to hit us, since explosions is also a pretty huge part of our crit procs, but I'd reasonably expect a drop of about 33% uptime on frost nova's freeze.
Thanks for your input. So you mean cold blooded does inc all dmg taken and not only frost (target needs to be frozen ofc).
Else how much resi you suggest (with energy armor and 40% AR rune)? Else Ill try the decreased cd time for frost nova. Hopefully Ill be able to get em atleast once or twice out of the way.
Hehe, sorry I've done a heavy amount of editing to that post.
Quite a bit of resists unfortunately, try about 500 before the rune and see if that is enough... but I suspect it might be more. I kept my buffed armor amount even with my buffed resists x10 while i was gearing up, to maintian price efficiency on the gear. So while i do recommend the same tactic, it'll probably cost more money than you currently have to do both right away... though it might be a good idea to go ahead and do both anyway... and maybe keep your current set for act 2 for now, since switching over will temporarily weaken your defence... I think. Maybe not as long as you switch back to force armor with the new gear... it should still be fine. Until you get to a point, probably around 300 base resist all where you can then handle act 2 with prismatic armor.
And that ^ is of course why i spent so much time editing... hehe. Thought barfing.
And apologies, It's after 2 AM here, so I have to sleep. But I'll hopefully remember I was doing this tomorrow morning and see if you have any more questions.
In the hopes that it might help answer any more questions. Though I should mention, I'm by no means an expert. But I have killed 95% of the rares I've come across in act 3/4 with my wizard as she is now, or worse.
I have a Barb too, Not sure of you have any questions there, but my Barb was the first one I cleared inferno with, and is still the easier one to do it with, albiet a little slower.
Oh, just noticed the Barb is in her act 3/4 magic find gear. Well she still runs it fine in that gear, but there might be a few wrong turns in there gear-wise.
Oh lol... and the wizard is partially naked... ok, nevermind, that is just a waste of your time, lol.
There's also always the option of skipping; Soul Rippers have been nasty since the beginning of the game. Not so much now but they are still hardly worth the time and effort it takes to kill them
imo, anyway
For a non-glass cannon build I find that I need at least 650-700 total resist all and 65% protection from Armor for Act 2 (Energy Armor buff included on both). Act 3 may need a bit more. Until you get that kind of protection, things like Ripper elite packs are going to rape you...
Since your not doing a CM/WW build I would recommend you change to a 'decoy' build teleport + fracture with Mirror Image + the 5 dupelicates, thats the only way I found to easily kill those rippers even if they are extra health + shielding.
Why resist all? Getting "some" resists from 1, 2 pieces in addition to high intellect and just stacking physical resist (way cheaper than resist all) and using prismatic armor (adding +40% resists!) on top of a decent amount of hitpoints looks more intuitive to me. You still don't want to stand in arcane beams or puddles of hurting stuff thus only eating a tick here and there once in a while. Force armor without a life regen gearset? Meh.
Thing is, it's the affixes that become truly difficult to survive in the higher acts. Physical damage you can mostly kite.
And you can get to 65% Armor without a shield or follower if you're using Energy Armor.
Also, sorry, mixed up Force Armor and Energy Armor
If you're using a kiting spec, that's your problem. Rippers are notorious for ripping appart kiting builds. Really your best bet is to skip them. Those elites, along with phasebeasts, fast mob and sometimes Demon Tremors are about the only mobs you should need to skip, if you have a decent kiting path.
Regarding all the talk of Resists and Prismatic Armor, if you're going to use a kiting spec, forget about Prismatic Armor. Unless you can get over 500k EHP with Prismatic Armor, it won't really provide any additional survivability over elite hits than using Force Armor with 118k-150k EHP. Elites will still kill you in 3 hits with Prismatic Armor because they hit for around 160k before mitigation. Also, you can reach those EHP levels through any number of combinations of HP, Armor, and resists. While resists and Armo are the theoretical best ways to achieve EHP threshholds, beause high resists and armor makes life regen, health potions, and DS more effective, Vit is the cheapest stat to use to reach those values, by far. For reference I have just over 118k EHP in my kiting gear shown in my profile. I only have 214 resists TOTAL on my char sheet, just under 30k hp and under 4500 armor buffed.
Regarding your spec, I'd drop Prodigy and Astral Pressence for Cold Blooded and Illusionist. If AP is an issue, try swapping your blizzard rune to the one that reduces AP cost. At 20 AP per cast, you shouldn't ever really have AP issues. Illusionist is great for survivability, especially with DS since it counts absorbed damage, so you can hit DS, get hit, and get a free teleport refresh without taking any damage.
If you used CM for Act 2, why switch to kite for Act 3? CM will make Ghom like 100 times easier, though kiting should work fine for the rest of Ac 3.
Thanks alot for the input. In the end I've done all ripper packs with CM build (tho had to switch for others so no nv stacking). But Ghom seemed impossible (maybe bad gear or/and bad skill). But passed him with this build
Are you using the same gear to kite with as you would for CM spec? If that's the case, you need lots more Resistances on your gear to make CM viable. I run with around 600 resists total, buffed with prismatic armor, and that's probably on the low end but it is viable. Also, you want to raise your crit a bit more. I see a ring and your amulet have crit damage but if you swap those for similar items with crit % instead, it could raise your crit by an easy 8-9% which would put you at just over 40%.
You also might want to invest in a shield to swap to for elites, nothing too expensive for now, just something with high crit (7%+), decent armor and whatever you can find with Vit, Int, and/or resists. Hopefully you can find something for 100k or less with that crit and some vit at least. If you opt to swap to a shield for some fights, you'll also need AP on crit on either a weapon or helm, so it might not be worthwhile for you.
Sidenote: Don't use teleport-fracture with MI. The teleport clones overwrite the Mirror Images. I'd either drop MI for DS or switch from fracture to wormhole.
I can't speak for Eu servers but on the US servers, amulets with 100 Int and 5% crit are under 5k and rings with 70 int and 3.5% crit are 20k (for blue ones). Seems pretty cheap to me. If you try to get crit% AND crit damage, then they'll be pretty expensive, but for CM crit damage is a luxury for dps while crit % is essential for survival and also improves dps.
Also, I'd recommend caclulating your EHP (there are tons of EHP spreadsheets or calculators out there and my sig has a link to my spreadsheet that includes one). For reference, I have around 500k EHP in my CM gear with 40-45% crit and shield (around 350k with source instead of shield) and I'm able to clear through Act 3 fairly easily, though frozen/arcane mobs are a pain, along with any mobs that are ranged and like to run away from you. If you are around 300-400k without a shield then you should be good to go against most elites with just about any shield with mildly decent stats. The more EHP you end up with the easier it becomes to get through elites and I wouldn't recommend trying with anything under 350k with shield. Even with that low EHP the white mobs might tear you to shreads at times.
The main problem with the CM build if you opt for using a shield against elites (which really makes life easier) is you'll need a new helm and/or a weapon with AP on crit to make up for the loss of it on your OH.
For what it's worth, I actually prefer the kiting specs to the CM builds. Overall I can farm faster with a kiting spec and I even die less, though my CM gear isn't all that great. The main advantage I see with the CM spec is against some bosses, like Diablo and Ghom. Ghom is really easy with a decent CM set and Diablo is easy with just a little extra EHP (I ran with around 200k in my kiting spec when I first killed him and he was very easy because Force Armor was hghly effective against all of his attacks at that EHP level).
I just passed act2 with twister/cm build and didn't had a real problem after some gear upgrades. Even the first 2 parts of act3 (5/5 signal fires + 3/3 catapults) were going pretty smooth until I've met my first group of rippers (fast,molten,extra health....) and I have 0 chance to kill em
Heres my gear and current specc
http://eu.battle.net...3/hero/11932256
So far I've tried the following speccs w/o a great success
http://eu.battle.net...iSQj!YZd!bbbZYa
with a bit diversity from teleport to various rune types for energy armor.
But they seem to simply one shot me.
Any suggestions on rippers, since it really pisses me off to not standing a chance to pass them.
As for upgrades. I have roughly 3 million to spend for gear (pm good pieces if you saw anything worth on ah <3)
Thanks in advance
So you'll have to switch strategies to having Resist All gear. And using Prismatic armor rune instead.
Also you could probably switch glass cannon to cold blooded, for 20% more damage at no cost, instead of 15% but costs armor and resist.
The wording on it is wrong, it increases all damage, not just cold damage.
Diamond skin is affected by your mitigation, so the more armor and resists you have, the more damage your skin will be able to take before breaking. Avoidance too, but it's not as big of a priority.
Also, another good option for increasing your defense is surprisingly changing the frost nova rune to reduce the cooldown, It doesn't immediately seem like a good idea since cooldowns are already so short with critical mass. But it makes a huge difference in the first 6 seconds of combat, which is the scariest time for a wind-up Wizard.
And eventually getting a hat and weapon for arcane power on crit will let you switch astral presence to Evocation, which again is basically like saying 15% more defence and 15% more damage, since it directly affects how mony explosions you have going off simultaneously, as well as the percentage of the time that the mobs spend frozen by frost nova and thus unable to attack you. And gets you a re-proc of diamond skin sooner.
I've actually managed a profitable run of act 3/4 with no vitality... I don't recommend it, but that gives you an idea of how important it is as a stat... you basically only need as much as your mitigation/avoidance and reliability to keep them frozen dictates... if they never clear through your diamond skin, your health doesn't matter.
Though with the patch coming in a couple days now, I expect more vitality to be necessary soon, Like... more than 0. Not sure exactly how hard the wicked wind nerf is actually going to hit us, since explosions is also a pretty huge part of our crit procs, but I'd reasonably expect a drop of about 33% uptime on frost nova's freeze.
Else how much resi you suggest (with energy armor and 40% AR rune)? Else Ill try the decreased cd time for frost nova. Hopefully Ill be able to get em atleast once or twice out of the way.
Quite a bit of resists unfortunately, try about 500 before the rune and see if that is enough... but I suspect it might be more. I kept my buffed armor amount even with my buffed resists x10 while i was gearing up, to maintian price efficiency on the gear. So while i do recommend the same tactic, it'll probably cost more money than you currently have to do both right away... though it might be a good idea to go ahead and do both anyway... and maybe keep your current set for act 2 for now, since switching over will temporarily weaken your defence... I think. Maybe not as long as you switch back to force armor with the new gear... it should still be fine. Until you get to a point, probably around 300 base resist all where you can then handle act 2 with prismatic armor.
And that ^ is of course why i spent so much time editing... hehe. Thought barfing.
I'll leave you with this http://us.battle.net...quinn2049-1176/
In the hopes that it might help answer any more questions. Though I should mention, I'm by no means an expert. But I have killed 95% of the rares I've come across in act 3/4 with my wizard as she is now, or worse.
I have a Barb too, Not sure of you have any questions there, but my Barb was the first one I cleared inferno with, and is still the easier one to do it with, albiet a little slower.
Oh, just noticed the Barb is in her act 3/4 magic find gear. Well she still runs it fine in that gear, but there might be a few wrong turns in there gear-wise.
Oh lol... and the wizard is partially naked... ok, nevermind, that is just a waste of your time, lol.
imo, anyway
And you can get to 65% Armor without a shield or follower if you're using Energy Armor.
Also, sorry, mixed up Force Armor and Energy Armor
Regarding all the talk of Resists and Prismatic Armor, if you're going to use a kiting spec, forget about Prismatic Armor. Unless you can get over 500k EHP with Prismatic Armor, it won't really provide any additional survivability over elite hits than using Force Armor with 118k-150k EHP. Elites will still kill you in 3 hits with Prismatic Armor because they hit for around 160k before mitigation. Also, you can reach those EHP levels through any number of combinations of HP, Armor, and resists. While resists and Armo are the theoretical best ways to achieve EHP threshholds, beause high resists and armor makes life regen, health potions, and DS more effective, Vit is the cheapest stat to use to reach those values, by far. For reference I have just over 118k EHP in my kiting gear shown in my profile. I only have 214 resists TOTAL on my char sheet, just under 30k hp and under 4500 armor buffed.
Regarding your spec, I'd drop Prodigy and Astral Pressence for Cold Blooded and Illusionist. If AP is an issue, try swapping your blizzard rune to the one that reduces AP cost. At 20 AP per cast, you shouldn't ever really have AP issues. Illusionist is great for survivability, especially with DS since it counts absorbed damage, so you can hit DS, get hit, and get a free teleport refresh without taking any damage.
If you used CM for Act 2, why switch to kite for Act 3? CM will make Ghom like 100 times easier, though kiting should work fine for the rest of Ac 3.
Crusader DPS and EHP Spreadsheet, meant for Crusaders
My Wizard
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#alQXiO!YcX!acYabc
Tho for the quest crossing the bridge its again a pain in the ass to switch around skills for every pack out there :(.
Anyway. Anyone with a suggestion about what to update first to make CM build more viable (3million to spend only)
You also might want to invest in a shield to swap to for elites, nothing too expensive for now, just something with high crit (7%+), decent armor and whatever you can find with Vit, Int, and/or resists. Hopefully you can find something for 100k or less with that crit and some vit at least. If you opt to swap to a shield for some fights, you'll also need AP on crit on either a weapon or helm, so it might not be worthwhile for you.
Sidenote: Don't use teleport-fracture with MI. The teleport clones overwrite the Mirror Images. I'd either drop MI for DS or switch from fracture to wormhole.
Crusader DPS and EHP Spreadsheet, meant for Crusaders
My Wizard
Yeah will check for a shield. But rings and amulets with crit% are insanely expensive. But maybe I'm lucky some day
Also, I'd recommend caclulating your EHP (there are tons of EHP spreadsheets or calculators out there and my sig has a link to my spreadsheet that includes one). For reference, I have around 500k EHP in my CM gear with 40-45% crit and shield (around 350k with source instead of shield) and I'm able to clear through Act 3 fairly easily, though frozen/arcane mobs are a pain, along with any mobs that are ranged and like to run away from you. If you are around 300-400k without a shield then you should be good to go against most elites with just about any shield with mildly decent stats. The more EHP you end up with the easier it becomes to get through elites and I wouldn't recommend trying with anything under 350k with shield. Even with that low EHP the white mobs might tear you to shreads at times.
The main problem with the CM build if you opt for using a shield against elites (which really makes life easier) is you'll need a new helm and/or a weapon with AP on crit to make up for the loss of it on your OH.
For what it's worth, I actually prefer the kiting specs to the CM builds. Overall I can farm faster with a kiting spec and I even die less, though my CM gear isn't all that great. The main advantage I see with the CM spec is against some bosses, like Diablo and Ghom. Ghom is really easy with a decent CM set and Diablo is easy with just a little extra EHP (I ran with around 200k in my kiting spec when I first killed him and he was very easy because Force Armor was hghly effective against all of his attacks at that EHP level).
Crusader DPS and EHP Spreadsheet, meant for Crusaders
My Wizard