Cold Snap vs Bone Chill: Better for packs of 3 elites or less.
Shock Armor - Shocking Aspect: This DOUBLES your Energy Twister damage!!!
Teleport - Fracture: Allows you to Freeze/DPS any monsters on your screen at once.
Evocation - Makes single target perma-freeze possible w/Cold Snap.
Please note: You require physical res of 700 unbuffed, playing with a Barb brings this to 1000.
I have 1.71 Attack Speed
41% Crit hit chance
30kdps
I can steam roll act 3 with a barb.
Word.
whats ur armor(unbuffed) and life? Seems like u would get 1-2 shotted most of the time without energy armor?
Venom hydra does significantly more damage than the other hydras, especially if the monsters are standing still or even moving slowly. I'm not sure about the exact math behind it, but a quick experiment will show you very clear results regarding how powerful venom hydra is. Arcane hydra is the 2nd most powerful (though quite weaker than venom), and is only any good with the matching passive, and even then it's not all that great really. Other hydras are just way too weak in comparison. Don't be mislead by the damage on the tooltip, as there seem to be additional mechanics affecting the actual damage they deal (making venom hydra that much stronger than it might seem if you just read the tooltip).
Wicked wind is a pretty weak spell. It is really ONLY good for ciritcal mass procs. Sure it deals some damage on top, but if you try to use it as a primary damage dealer, you will find yourself switching it out to just about anything else pretty quickly.
I don't wear any MF because I want to be farming act 3. Currently I'm still unsure whether act 2 with MF is better or worse than act 3 without MF spending the same amount of gold on gear, but so far it seems like if I wanted to get enough MF to matter, I'll either have to spend more gold or farm act 2 slower. When I can do act 2 in ~2.5 hours, I will need pretty high MF to compensate if I want to run act 2 in more than 1.5 hours, and getting there without getting the run time closer to 2~2.5 hours would cost a lot. Again, not saying anything definite, because this is impossible to truly theorycraft, but my guess is getting into act 3 2.5h runs would end up more profitable. Not to mention that with a sprint barb finding elite packs we can run it in under 2 hours, making act 2 farming even less viable. For act 3 I don't see how I can afford any MF without making a lot more gold than I have now, since even after getting a few upgrades some elites are still quite difficult/annoying, and dying slows you down so much when you are solo (less so in group due to banner teleport, but still a noticeable slowdown).
As for wizard vs barb, I have 2 friends who rolled run like the wind barbs, and spending less gold than me they are farming faster. I doubt this is because they are better players. The class and build simply require less expensive gear to do the same at the same speed. Sure, a critical mass wizard might be able to clear stuff with even cheaper gear than the barb would need to clear it, but once both have enough gear to clear it, the barb definitely clears it significantly faster. Remember that Kripp's gear doesn't really give him more run speed than any undergeared barbarian! He just saves a few seconds on each elite pack and saves deaths on some nasty ones that would spawn a lot of random crap on your screen too quickly if you don't have enough DPS, but since most of the time is really spent finding elites rather than killing them, the barb is the clear winner here regardless whether you have just the bare minimum needed to farm act 3 or if you have Kripp level of gear. The difference is much more significant in act 3, too, since there are a lot of doorways where teleport just doesn't work well.
I have been using the templar for his emergency healing abilities and gave him a lot of vit (>90k hp) so he stays alive to use them. Recently, though, I have switched him for the enchantress with some minimal MF/vit gear for the armor and MF bonus, both of which apply even if she is dead (and the vit is there so that she dies less so that I have the 3% attack speed buff avaiablle more often, as it does go away if she dies).
FYI, parts of this guide are sort of out of date now. The gearing section still applies, but the builds section is a little dated due to the patch. I'm planning on rewriting parts of it, but havn't had a chance to get to it yet and am kind of waiting on things to fully shake out from the patch. It should get done in the next week or so though.
Coming back to this game and needing to read up on the changes since; this post has been helpful in deciding on both to keep playing my Wizard and in how to play him since Blizzard/Hydra.
Coming back to this game and needing to read up on the changes since; this post has been helpful in deciding on both to keep playing my Wizard and in how to play him since Blizzard/Hydra.
That is interesting. Coming back from when? May 2012? There were about 5 major patches since the last update of the OP (August 2012)... not to say the info is outdated, but obviously lots of stuff just wasn't around in August. The game changed a lot since then.
Wicked wind is a pretty weak spell. It is really ONLY good for ciritcal mass procs. Sure it deals some damage on top, but if you try to use it as a primary damage dealer, you will find yourself switching it out to just about anything else pretty quickly.
I don't wear any MF because I want to be farming act 3. Currently I'm still unsure whether act 2 with MF is better or worse than act 3 without MF spending the same amount of gold on gear, but so far it seems like if I wanted to get enough MF to matter, I'll either have to spend more gold or farm act 2 slower. When I can do act 2 in ~2.5 hours, I will need pretty high MF to compensate if I want to run act 2 in more than 1.5 hours, and getting there without getting the run time closer to 2~2.5 hours would cost a lot. Again, not saying anything definite, because this is impossible to truly theorycraft, but my guess is getting into act 3 2.5h runs would end up more profitable. Not to mention that with a sprint barb finding elite packs we can run it in under 2 hours, making act 2 farming even less viable. For act 3 I don't see how I can afford any MF without making a lot more gold than I have now, since even after getting a few upgrades some elites are still quite difficult/annoying, and dying slows you down so much when you are solo (less so in group due to banner teleport, but still a noticeable slowdown).
As for wizard vs barb, I have 2 friends who rolled run like the wind barbs, and spending less gold than me they are farming faster. I doubt this is because they are better players. The class and build simply require less expensive gear to do the same at the same speed. Sure, a critical mass wizard might be able to clear stuff with even cheaper gear than the barb would need to clear it, but once both have enough gear to clear it, the barb definitely clears it significantly faster. Remember that Kripp's gear doesn't really give him more run speed than any undergeared barbarian! He just saves a few seconds on each elite pack and saves deaths on some nasty ones that would spawn a lot of random crap on your screen too quickly if you don't have enough DPS, but since most of the time is really spent finding elites rather than killing them, the barb is the clear winner here regardless whether you have just the bare minimum needed to farm act 3 or if you have Kripp level of gear. The difference is much more significant in act 3, too, since there are a lot of doorways where teleport just doesn't work well.
I have been using the templar for his emergency healing abilities and gave him a lot of vit (>90k hp) so he stays alive to use them. Recently, though, I have switched him for the enchantress with some minimal MF/vit gear for the armor and MF bonus, both of which apply even if she is dead (and the vit is there so that she dies less so that I have the 3% attack speed buff avaiablle more often, as it does go away if she dies).
That is interesting. Coming back from when? May 2012? There were about 5 major patches since the last update of the OP (August 2012)... not to say the info is outdated, but obviously lots of stuff just wasn't around in August. The game changed a lot since then.
Unpinning due to obvious reasons.
Ha. Bagstone.