Playing a wizard and trying to see which is better, Ray of Frost seems to do more damage AND does the Slow effect but why do so many wizards use disintegrate instead, am I missing something?
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I agree with feminism. I don't think that it's right that for every dollar a man makes, a women gets 70 cents. Why do I only get 30 cents and some chick gets the rest?
Before I was efficiently farming Act III, I used disintegrate when going up against hordes and elites but if I struggled against a boss, RoF can give me an edge
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Both neither are viable at inferno for act 3/4, unless you outgear (vastly) the content
So what's a good single attack?
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I agree with feminism. I don't think that it's right that for every dollar a man makes, a women gets 70 cents. Why do I only get 30 cents and some chick gets the rest?
I second the arcane orb w/ tap the source for single target. Maybe throw an Arcane missile in there too... Other than bosses, where do you do single target stuff though?
I like the idea of both RoF and disintegrate - they are 'instant' attacks if you wish, no travel time, point, click and it hits target instantly. This isn't so much about having trouble aiming at moving mobs, this is more about speed. After running archon for ages now - i'm very used to fast clearances and find it far more efficient. However it would be absolutely awesome to forgo having to manage archon CD and just have a beam.
The trouble with RoF is that it's single target and lets face it, once you get up to about 100+k DPS, clearing elites is not an issue, they die relatively fast, we spend FAR more time killing huge quantities of non-elite white trash mobs and RoF absolutely sucks at that.
Disintegrate is good in sense that it can even blow up killed mobs for high dmg AOE (375% wpn damage i think?) But, it's base low weapon damage is very disappointing. Another issue is that to get to higher DPS you have got to have AiS on your gear, which means you will drain your AP quite fast:
20 AP per 'swing' for disintegrate, for example 1.4 attack speed with a 2 hander and a few pcs of gear with +ais = 28 AP per second to sustain the beam. Base AP regen is 10 AP per sec, with a couple of skills you can bring it up to 14, with tal's set bring it up to 16, that's still far away from being able to sustain it via pure AP regen.
That means the only way to really sustain it is via APoC, which implies you HAVE to go 1 hander + OH, and that stuff is stupid expensive especially if you want to get one with +crit dmg + socket + life steal. Yea you can do without life steal, but that means you have to stack LoH on other slots (rings / ammy / etc) which is very expensive as well.
Alternatively - you can get prodigy / etc way to regen your AP, which means your beam is not sustained, you beam for a few seconds and then you have to regen your AP with signature spells...
Do not forget - to cast disintegrate - you have to stand still = you need good resists / armor / EHP. Surely you can get diamond skin, but you have to have 300k DPS or so to be able to kill an elite within the duration of diamond skin, 'cos once it's off - without high EHP = you're dead.
All of that added together = disintegrate build is going to be VERY VERY expensive, surely it is doable, but for the same money you can farm twice as fast in archon... Basically, imho disintegrate is a completely failed skill and needs a revamp.
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"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
On the topic of disintegrate, I've noticed something odd happening with my Stone of Jordan. (+15 Arc power, -5 Arc Power Cost for Disintegrate). Namely it lasts a REALLY long time with my .9 swing speed weapon. So I did some testing at different speeds.
The equation I used for estimating casting time is:
Min Arc Value = Max Arc + Regen Rate * Time - Swing Speed * Cost *Time
6 = 115 + 10*T -0.9*15*T T=31.14 in this case
Not sure what's going on in between 0.9 and 0.92 attack speeds, but I can't test it (0.9 swing speed + 2%IAS hops right to 0.92)
EDIT: Updated graph with more accurate data, All tests were done WITHOUT Astral Presence, and without passive from enchantress
How's the build working out for you? As much as i love the archon, having to manage the CD of it is an extra pain that i would like to get rid of and i certainly enjoy laser beams
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"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
I use disintegrate instead of piercing orb, and I can kill all mobs and most elites, but sometimes I can't outheal the damage they do to me if I'm not in archon form.
But I usually don't have to worry about waiting for archon and stopping. With as high of dmg and defenses I have along with max movement speed. I can hit and run with archon and hydra to kill things, along with scoundral slowing with a frost bow....just can't quite facetank all elites with disintegrate yet.
After your post, i went to get an SoJ similar to yours exception that mine adds to 6% arcane damage and 5 cost of disintegrate. I gotta admit, that even though i've lost 16k+ paper DPS from the chat sheet - omfg. The elites melt, literally see me and die. As for disintegrate cost - i do run out of AP, but it takes ages with astral presence, i've got 1.25 ApS i think, i didn't time it exactly but even elites don't live long enough for me to drain my AP out.
I'll add it to my archon guide in fact, the disintegrate really does work out damn nice, far better than piercing orb or forked lightning. I tried a few different runes as well, ended up using the same as you - chaos nexus. Because even though disintegrate doesn't go thru waller walls - the extra shots from it do, so you can spam the wall with the mobs standing right behind it and they all get hit, it also provides very nice additional life steal healing from hitting multiple mobs that are backstabbing you
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"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Yeah, a higher IAS will greatly reduce the amount of time you can cast disintegrate, I updated my data a few more times with more swing speeds and added a graph of swing speed vs cast time. I didn't use astral presence to collect the data, but I still think something funny is happening with a 0.9 attacks/sec swing speed.
It could be some weird rounding interacting taking place between the semi-continuous AP cost and less than one second swing speed. Not sure how to find out going forward though.
A note on Chaos Nexus Rune, You can get those little side beams to also strike your primary single target if you aim the beam to be tangent to what you're shooting at. There's a kind of conal dead zone for them in front of you, so try to both be hitting the enemy and keep part of their hit box outside of that cone.
On a side note, how awesome is it to just walk through destructible doors with firewalkers in archon form? IMO It's really awesome.
I think you could test it with various attack speeds first to substantiate the graph - as far as i could gather you used that equation for the graph, why not just buy a few items with IAS and test it out to see if it holds up.
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"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Both neither are viable at inferno for act 3/4, unless you outgear (vastly) the content
What would you consider to be "outgeared"?
I'm a smidgen under 200k dps on the character screen and I don't do enough dps to use either disintegrate or ray of frost in normal grinding. Or rather, I don't do enough dps to make it more efficient than 10-20 other spell combinations I can think of.
Both neither are viable at inferno for act 3/4, unless you outgear (vastly) the content
What would you consider to be "outgeared"?
I'm a smidgen under 200k dps on the character screen and I don't do enough dps to use either disintegrate or ray of frost in normal grinding. Or rather, I don't do enough dps to make it more efficient than 10-20 other spell combinations I can think of.
If you're using a 2 hander with archon spec I can't think of anything better than disintegrate to fill the down time and keep moving. This coming from a barely 100k dps farmer.
I swap in an apoc wand and offhand, both with crap for dps so I can cycle my archon cooldown in about 5 seconds with critical mass against a pack of 3-5 mobs, then go right back into archon mode.
I just stick to using disintegrate, follow alkaiser's farming method, if i ever do run out of archon, it's gonna be for not more than 10-15 seconds. No APoC gear, not using CM for it either, CM procs a couple of seconds for me, but doesn't really matter. Swapped in the SoJ instead of the ring went down from 155k DPS to 130k DPS and i'm doing even faster than before in killing elites now. Even with 130k DPS disintegrate kills very fast, just a couple of seconds of channeling and most normal mobs are dead. Phase beasts and blah takes a bit longer, but i can even kill champs with it easily. I don't see why you would say other spells can outdo it, when there's no other 'intant hitting' spell that would do such AoE + Single target DPS at the same time to fill in the 10-15 seconds of archon downtime.
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"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Both neither are viable at inferno for act 3/4, unless you outgear (vastly) the content
What would you consider to be "outgeared"?
I'm a smidgen under 200k dps on the character screen and I don't do enough dps to use either disintegrate or ray of frost in normal grinding. Or rather, I don't do enough dps to make it more efficient than 10-20 other spell combinations I can think of.
If you're using a 2 hander with archon spec I can't think of anything better than disintegrate to fill the down time and keep moving. This coming from a barely 100k dps farmer.
That's pretty much my personal spec. I am running a Skorn with high Int, crit damage, socket and huge LoK. I run most of Act III in Arcon. Heck, most of the time my Arcon runs out I just hit it again and clear the level and move on to the next. I am at 110k, and 97k with full MF gear. For the most part, it makes Act III a face roll.
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Simply down to what you need it for.
And may the odds be ever in your favour.
Emmo#2406
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So what's a good single attack?
Arcane Orb seems to be the most popular. Tap the source is probably the most widely used rune though some, like myself, prefer Celestial Orb.
Crusader DPS and EHP Spreadsheet, meant for Crusaders
My Wizard
The trouble with RoF is that it's single target and lets face it, once you get up to about 100+k DPS, clearing elites is not an issue, they die relatively fast, we spend FAR more time killing huge quantities of non-elite white trash mobs and RoF absolutely sucks at that.
Disintegrate is good in sense that it can even blow up killed mobs for high dmg AOE (375% wpn damage i think?) But, it's base low weapon damage is very disappointing. Another issue is that to get to higher DPS you have got to have AiS on your gear, which means you will drain your AP quite fast:
20 AP per 'swing' for disintegrate, for example 1.4 attack speed with a 2 hander and a few pcs of gear with +ais = 28 AP per second to sustain the beam. Base AP regen is 10 AP per sec, with a couple of skills you can bring it up to 14, with tal's set bring it up to 16, that's still far away from being able to sustain it via pure AP regen.
That means the only way to really sustain it is via APoC, which implies you HAVE to go 1 hander + OH, and that stuff is stupid expensive especially if you want to get one with +crit dmg + socket + life steal. Yea you can do without life steal, but that means you have to stack LoH on other slots (rings / ammy / etc) which is very expensive as well.
Alternatively - you can get prodigy / etc way to regen your AP, which means your beam is not sustained, you beam for a few seconds and then you have to regen your AP with signature spells...
Do not forget - to cast disintegrate - you have to stand still = you need good resists / armor / EHP. Surely you can get diamond skin, but you have to have 300k DPS or so to be able to kill an elite within the duration of diamond skin, 'cos once it's off - without high EHP = you're dead.
All of that added together = disintegrate build is going to be VERY VERY expensive, surely it is doable, but for the same money you can farm twice as fast in archon... Basically, imho disintegrate is a completely failed skill and needs a revamp.
The equation I used for estimating casting time is:
Min Arc Value = Max Arc + Regen Rate * Time - Swing Speed * Cost *Time
6 = 115 + 10*T -0.9*15*T T=31.14 in this case
Not sure what's going on in between 0.9 and 0.92 attack speeds, but I can't test it (0.9 swing speed + 2%IAS hops right to 0.92)
EDIT: Updated graph with more accurate data, All tests were done WITHOUT Astral Presence, and without passive from enchantress
How's the build working out for you? As much as i love the archon, having to manage the CD of it is an extra pain that i would like to get rid of and i certainly enjoy laser beams
But I usually don't have to worry about waiting for archon and stopping. With as high of dmg and defenses I have along with max movement speed. I can hit and run with archon and hydra to kill things, along with scoundral slowing with a frost bow....just can't quite facetank all elites with disintegrate yet.
I'll add it to my archon guide in fact, the disintegrate really does work out damn nice, far better than piercing orb or forked lightning. I tried a few different runes as well, ended up using the same as you - chaos nexus. Because even though disintegrate doesn't go thru waller walls - the extra shots from it do, so you can spam the wall with the mobs standing right behind it and they all get hit, it also provides very nice additional life steal healing from hitting multiple mobs that are backstabbing you
It could be some weird rounding interacting taking place between the semi-continuous AP cost and less than one second swing speed. Not sure how to find out going forward though.
A note on Chaos Nexus Rune, You can get those little side beams to also strike your primary single target if you aim the beam to be tangent to what you're shooting at. There's a kind of conal dead zone for them in front of you, so try to both be hitting the enemy and keep part of their hit box outside of that cone.
On a side note, how awesome is it to just walk through destructible doors with firewalkers in archon form? IMO It's really awesome.
EDIT: I Edit my posts quite alot.
I only had an equation generate the orange numbers as a comparison for how I assumed it to work (which it obviously doesn't work that way).
Now I'm at the stage where I need to figure out what the equation to model the game behavior should be.
What would you consider to be "outgeared"?
I'm a smidgen under 200k dps on the character screen and I don't do enough dps to use either disintegrate or ray of frost in normal grinding. Or rather, I don't do enough dps to make it more efficient than 10-20 other spell combinations I can think of.
If you're using a 2 hander with archon spec I can't think of anything better than disintegrate to fill the down time and keep moving. This coming from a barely 100k dps farmer.
That's pretty much my personal spec. I am running a Skorn with high Int, crit damage, socket and huge LoK. I run most of Act III in Arcon. Heck, most of the time my Arcon runs out I just hit it again and clear the level and move on to the next. I am at 110k, and 97k with full MF gear. For the most part, it makes Act III a face roll.