Force Armor will definitely work on poison damage, though I assume you're both talking about DoT (which poison inherently is not).
DoT becomes a good question. Poison was the greatest weakness of Energy Shield back in D2 for the same reasons. Obviously there are a lot of specific interactions here that we don't fully understand yet. DoT could be affected by Force Armor, reducing the damage total before dividing it into ticks, in which case we can basically ignore it completely. More likely, I feel like it probably won't affect it because no single tick deals greater than 35% of your health in damage. In this case, DoT will become a weakness of this build, and we'll have to find ways to work around it. In D2, Energy Shield sorceresses were able to completely ignore Fire / Lit / Cold resistance, but tended to stack Poison resistance because it ignored Energy Shield. We're going to have to see what the primary DoT dealers are and compensate accordingly.
That being said, I still believe that this build will be superior overall to a high VIT wizard once you reach Inferno.
Yeah, good points. If we only need resistances to negate things like Poison damage, then we will be fine as we will be stacking as much Intelligence as possible. Bleeding is still a worry though. But as others have said, this build might be great in some areas and not good in others. The most exciting thing will be finding it out for ourselves
I have a feeling that in practice this won't work nearly how it is expected. Most of the time you have effects like those discussed here they have an internal CD. The only thing that makes me wonder about this is one isn't stated, but it doesn't necessarily have to be to be there, it just usually is stated. If there isn't one, have fun, because if you can avoid taking multiple hits at once it seems like a good build. The only problem I see is the lack of damage.
I understand its a chip away build, thats fine, the problem is that when you first encounter a group, say its the first in an area, they will come after you, and you have to kite. Okay kite away, until you run into another group and they ambush you. Likely a wizard will want to avoid taking most hits anyway. So I'm not gonna say this build won't work. But it will be really skill reliant. And there are lots of things that can go wrong and screw you. Probably fun to play, but not likely to end up working. Not with monsters that can throw a wall up in your way, or teleport on top of you.
It's not a chip away build at all (only that one super defensive option that was posted is). In fact, we can focus even more heavily on INT gear and passives like Glass Cannon because our armor and resistances don't matter. If anything this build has a potential for much higher DPS than other Wizards.
Yeah. Maybe this needs a new thread because everyone who comes to it sees the exaggerated title and the super defensive build and says OMG THIS HAS NO DAMAGE IT WILL NOT WORK. Or OMG YOU WILL TAKE 3 HITS AND DIE LOLOL. We have already replied to those kinds of comments 20 times.
Some things that should be made clear:
This build will be far from invincible, but if it works as most of us think, it will have greatly improved potential for survivability, due to its huge HP regen and ability to cast Teleport and create Illusions after every instance of damage taken.
This build can deal damage. In fact you can completely drop your armor and HP affixes for intelligence and other offensive stats like +crit. There should also be room for about 2 non-signature damage spells, which is optimal anyway.
As everyone else is saying, being attacked by more than one enemy at a time is probably going to kill any Wizard. At least with this strategy, if you can avoid instant death (Dodge % and Slow Time), you will be far better off, as you can passively regen your full HP many times a second.
As I mentioned earlier, I think Ancient Guardian is pretty weak, and I have a feeling that Diamond Skin is going to be applied before Force Armor. Depending on whether this is true or not, Diamond Skin is either completely useless (if true) or virtually imperative.
I don't think having only one offensive spell (Arcane Orb or Comet) is going to be viable whatsoever, even as a 'chip away' build.
I'd love to see some insight on what I posted on the last page (http://us.battle.net...eQgO!XUd!YbaYYY, more detailed explanation in previous post). I've always known I was going to play Wizard first, but this is the first build that I'm really excited to play in end game.
Yeah Nightmare, I like that build. I was thinking about something similar, you need Slow Time, Tele (with Illusionist) and Energy Armor.
Can you explain your offensive abilities? I've never been that familiar with Wizard spells. So Magic Missile is your preferred signature, then Disentegrate for single target and AoE explosions, and Arcane Torrent for AoE and increased damage?
I'm also really really excited about trying this build. I used to want to play Wizard maybe 4th, but now it's pushing up to about 2nd
I predict your inability to use gear with VIT on it to be your main downfall.
All in all I really don't think this will work well at all. I came up with a similar build months ago back when the familiar absorbed 8 attacks and didn't have a time limit on it. It worked much better back then, now it's not really that great.
I don't see why it's a huge problem that you can't use VIT gear? The idea is that Force Armor lets you bypass Vitality and Armor. If you're suggesting that having only 1.5K HP is extremely risky, well of course, but we have to wait and see how well this works.
But in the meantime, the wizard gained the ability to dodge. We could eventually manage to get 50% dodge + 4K life/sec, plus the ability to reset teleport every hit.
Just my 2 cents but.... I played beta for quite awhile and by the time you were level 13, with just basic found gear your HP was ussually over 1k. So I assume it will be damn near impossible to have <or= 1500 HP at level 60.
Items only increase your HP if they have +Vitality. Each single point of Vitality gives you 10 HP. In the beta it was easy to find armor with +10 Vit, meaning it gave you 100 more HP.
You can control how much HP you have. Simply remove armor with +Vit, and you will get to around 1500 HP at level 60.
If this works, doesn't it mean you won't have to worry about armor and resistances at all? All you have to worry about is reducing the number of hits you take per second. So you could go completely glass cannon and use something like Slow Time and Teleport for when you get surrounded by lots of little people, then destroy them with your crazy damage. You could take Glass Cannon passive as you don't need armor or res, and Illusionist. Teleport will come off cooldown every hit you take.
We seem to be ushering in the Energy Shield Sorceress from Diablo 2 into Diablo 3. No percent damage reduction, no resistances, just redirected damage and a gigantic pool to draw from. I'm very excited about this.
Personally, however, I think most of the skills in the offered build are unnecessary. Ancient Guardian defending you once every 6 seconds (and only while you're on low health) is practically useless compared to Force Armor. Mirror Image is probably superfluous as well. The only thing we really need here is Force Armor and an absolute focus on +Regen gear and zero +VIT gear. Beyond that, are best options for survival are debuffs/snares that will reduce the rate at which we take damage (Slow Time with Perpetuity seems like a good option for the most possible up-time).
Yes, I definitely don't agree with the OP's build. Just the general idea of Force Armor and regen.
However, I think Teleport would be almost necessary, considering that it would be off cooldown after every hit. That would be so powerful.
I didn't play with floating numbers on, but I did tend to get a lot of health regen affixes (especially in previous patches where you were guaranteed +3 regen from the rare crafted belt) and it certainly felt like it was coming in continuously, the same way Arcane Power and other resources come in continuously instead of in discrete chunks. The same was true for DoT damage, which was very obvious when playing a Witch Doctor - health bars creeped down continuously under the effect of the DoT, but you only saw a damage floater every half second.
Thinking about it, I would assume all the regen / degen mechanics work the same way - more or less continuous damage with half second cumulative floaters.
So if all that is true, a low HP, high regen, Energy Armored Wizard should be incredibly difficult to kill with packet damage, but will likely explode instantly when affected by any DoT effects. The question, then, is how common are DoT effects, and if there's anything else we're missing.
That's great news about HP regen coming in continually, I really hoped it would work like that.
About DoT damage against this build, it might not be instant death. Because suppose that the incoming DoT is reduced to 35% of your max health, and suppose that your max health is 2k. But if you have 4k hp regen and +HP every attack, your regen capacities might be able to outbalance the incoming DoT.
Edit: or maybe DoTs will be Blizzard's way of preventing this build from being too good
I never saw any healing #s floating above my head in the beta. Did you have some kind of option in the Scrolling combat text on.
I'm not sure what exact options there were, but I definitely went into the options and ticked on all options that give you a graphical representation of health bars, damage numbers, hp numbers etc.
That showed me HP regen, so if I had +2 HP regen per second, I would see a green "+2" near my char every second. I don't know if that means you recieve your HP regen in a chunk every second, or whether it's applied fractionally.
I'm guessing it will be applied fractionally, because say you're level 60 and you have 3k HP regen, it would be strange if you got a 3k chunk of HP once a second. Let's hope it's fractional, because it would make much more sense to get your HP faster than once a second.
Why are you all under the ridiculous assumption that life regen per second means that it only comes in once per second? That's NEVER been the case in Diablo. You don't instantly get 10 AP every time a second ticks by, do you? No, you get 1 AP every 0.1 seconds. The regeneration is divided into frames and broken down as small as possible to give a steady stream.
What Ensign said before was completely accurate—perfect life regenerating gear will replenish the damage you suffer from a hit to your force armor every 0.117 seconds, so you'd have to get hit more frequently than that (and enough to counter the additional bonuses afforded from amethysts, etc) in order to go down. Which isn't to say that you might not take 3 ranged hits all at the same time and get dropped. But everyone putting everything in terms of full seconds is downright stupid.
Though, I do agree with whoever said that it will probably be exceedingly hard to avoid +VIT gear, and every little bit means we need significantly more regen.
This...
How does it not make sense?
I'm just going to say this.
It says:
Life regen per second.
Not this:
Life regen every second.
Per second means it has to be divided by the second so that the regeneration is done over the length of the entire second, not at the end of the second.
It was that way in D2 - and in fact - it's that way in every game as long as the skill doing the healing doesn't say every second or at the end of the effect.
If you played the beta, and you had 1 life regen per second; it would pop up as 0 several times and then say 1.
Ok, I was assuming that life regen is applied once per second (in one chunk), because in the beta I would see a little green number pop up once a second. I made the assumption that the visual representation matched the actual regen mechanics. But it could definitely be the case that it's applied in fractions, and that they only show it once per second to make the graphics less cluttered.
If regen applies, say, every 0.1 of a second, then that's great because it means this build will potentially be very viable.
And I think it will be possible to avoid stacking +VIT gear. It might be a common affix, but that doesn't mean you won't be able to find things without it.
If this works, doesn't it mean you won't have to worry about armor and resistances at all? All you have to worry about is reducing the number of hits you take per second. So you could go completely glass cannon and use something like Slow Time and Teleport for when you get surrounded by lots of little people, then destroy them with your crazy damage. You could take Glass Cannon passive as you don't need armor or res, and Illusionist. Teleport will come off cooldown every hit you take.
I'm actually really excited about trying this
Edit: Red Panda, I never saw those 0s popping up, and I had all number options turned on. I was playing a few weeks before open beta. Was that earlier in the beta?
can we put this to rest? it's not interesting, it's just a ripoff of 55monk builds from GW, an idea that is seriously like 6-7 years old. The difference being this build is missing a Shielding Hands equivalent, which, when applied correctly would take effect after the % reduction and would then reduce the leftover damage by a straight number.
player has 55 health, protective spirit (can't take more than 10% dmg) means you don't get hit for more than 5.5 dmg in a game where most players max health is 600(not significant, just for reference). Add shielding hands which has a longer duration than it's CD and reduces damage by up to 20 after the previous reduction if done correctly and you take zero damage except for "degen" damage but every 55monk had a ton of regen because that's what they relied on for heals.
But I digress. the fact is this near 55 clone doesn't have "shielding hands" so after the first reply of "being attacked by more than one enemy" the only subsequent post we should have seen is "/thread"
Just because it's possible to do in another game doesn't mean it shouldn't be discussed or that it isn't interesting. I already made the link between this idea and the 55HP Monk from GW, but I didn't abuse anyone for bringing this up.
However I've been thinking about it more and I don't think it will work (as you said), because it doesn't seem possible to reduce the 35% damage, or to heal faster than once per second.
Doesn't mean it shouldn't be discussed though. Maybe you should go play some more Guild Wars.
I will say though that it is a really interesting concept. Before I really thought about how it could easily be countered in the right (wrong?) situation, I thought to myself "Damn, that's a good idea."
Second: Everything is possible in imaginary word. Your build is horrible tho.
I don't think we should dismiss this idea so hastily.
The core idea is that all damage is reduced to 35% of your max HP, and assuming you have a very low HP pool, you can regen all of your HP every second.
Ever heard of more damage than you can handle? No effective health strat is gonna work...yes...
Look. I'm not critiquing his whole build, just the core idea which I described before.
Yes, you can die with this build. Obviously if you get overwhelmed and take a huge burst of damage in under 1 second, you will die.
I'm simply saying that it's worth trying out. It could be a very effective core of a build.
Sure it's a strange idea, but that doesn't entail it won't be effective. If it's possible to further reduce the 35% damage per hit, you could end up having a very survivable Wizard who can regen their entire HP pool every second.
I also think you could get rid of Mirror Image and Familiar and replace them with stronger offensive spells.
If you're not interested in trying strange ideas, then go play a cookie cutter Wizard build, but don't stay on this thread saying that it's shit and won't work, unless you can provide strong arguments or evidence to support your claims.
I will say though that it is a really interesting concept. Before I really thought about how it could easily be countered in the right (wrong?) situation, I thought to myself "Damn, that's a good idea."
Second: Everything is possible in imaginary word. Your build is horrible tho.
I don't think we should dismiss this idea so hastily.
The core idea is that all damage is reduced to 35% of your max HP, and assuming you have a very low HP pool, you can regen all of your HP every second.
This means that if it's possible to reduce incoming damage even further, it will be possible to survive, unless you get hit a huge number of times in one second.
Let's say that you try to maximise your Intelligence (for damage), your Armor and Strength (for damage reduction) and have enough HP regen to refill your health pool every second. Obviously, you won't be getting any more Vitality, so all Vitality is replaced with Strength.
I don't know how it works, but if the 35% incoming damage is affected by other forms of damage reduction (Armor and Strength), then each hit will end up being a very low percentage of your max HP. This means you can potentially survive, I don't know let's say 10 hits per second.
Top of the line chest armor (or an amulet) can provide up to 599 health per second in natural regen; misc armor peices and rings can give up to 342. A full set of perfect regen gear gives 4618 health per second. Since at base health you'd take 541 damage per hit, that means you'd regenerate the damage taken every 0.117 seconds.
Weapons, off-hand items, and amulets can also provide up to 959 health restored per hit. Couple that with items that have a high tick rate, and you'll restore nearly two hits worth of damage for each hit you take.
I'm not sure what could kill you in that circumstance - a very high tick rate DoT? Getting completely swarmed and bursted? I'd really like to know.
I would assume that 1000 health per second is just that 1000 health per second, not 100 health per 0.1 seconds. Though you bring up an interesting point about gear. If you could regen more health than you have, then you could drop galvanizing ward as it would be worthless at that point.
Normal Regen
The templar's loyalty buff might be on a separate timer as normal regen.
Also, the heals from the Amethyst Gems would happen at different times.
So that is potentially 3 heals, all coming in at different times to help ensure you don't get burst down by a bunch of guys.
Force armor doesn't say the attack has to lower your health by more than 35%, just if it could. Also Diamond skin doesn't technically add to your health pool, just absorb dmg. Therefore the attacks would come in and hit for like 500 dmg(35% of your max health), whilst Diamond Skin absorbs 10k.
Yeah, good points. If we only need resistances to negate things like Poison damage, then we will be fine as we will be stacking as much Intelligence as possible. Bleeding is still a worry though. But as others have said, this build might be great in some areas and not good in others. The most exciting thing will be finding it out for ourselves
Could you be any more negative.
Yeah. Maybe this needs a new thread because everyone who comes to it sees the exaggerated title and the super defensive build and says OMG THIS HAS NO DAMAGE IT WILL NOT WORK. Or OMG YOU WILL TAKE 3 HITS AND DIE LOLOL. We have already replied to those kinds of comments 20 times.
Some things that should be made clear:
As everyone else is saying, being attacked by more than one enemy at a time is probably going to kill any Wizard. At least with this strategy, if you can avoid instant death (Dodge % and Slow Time), you will be far better off, as you can passively regen your full HP many times a second.
Yeah Nightmare, I like that build. I was thinking about something similar, you need Slow Time, Tele (with Illusionist) and Energy Armor.
Can you explain your offensive abilities? I've never been that familiar with Wizard spells. So Magic Missile is your preferred signature, then Disentegrate for single target and AoE explosions, and Arcane Torrent for AoE and increased damage?
I'm also really really excited about trying this build. I used to want to play Wizard maybe 4th, but now it's pushing up to about 2nd
I don't see why it's a huge problem that you can't use VIT gear? The idea is that Force Armor lets you bypass Vitality and Armor. If you're suggesting that having only 1.5K HP is extremely risky, well of course, but we have to wait and see how well this works.
^
Items only increase your HP if they have +Vitality. Each single point of Vitality gives you 10 HP. In the beta it was easy to find armor with +10 Vit, meaning it gave you 100 more HP.
You can control how much HP you have. Simply remove armor with +Vit, and you will get to around 1500 HP at level 60.
Yes, I definitely don't agree with the OP's build. Just the general idea of Force Armor and regen.
However, I think Teleport would be almost necessary, considering that it would be off cooldown after every hit. That would be so powerful.
That's great news about HP regen coming in continually, I really hoped it would work like that.
About DoT damage against this build, it might not be instant death. Because suppose that the incoming DoT is reduced to 35% of your max health, and suppose that your max health is 2k. But if you have 4k hp regen and +HP every attack, your regen capacities might be able to outbalance the incoming DoT.
Edit: or maybe DoTs will be Blizzard's way of preventing this build from being too good
I'm not sure what exact options there were, but I definitely went into the options and ticked on all options that give you a graphical representation of health bars, damage numbers, hp numbers etc.
That showed me HP regen, so if I had +2 HP regen per second, I would see a green "+2" near my char every second. I don't know if that means you recieve your HP regen in a chunk every second, or whether it's applied fractionally.
I'm guessing it will be applied fractionally, because say you're level 60 and you have 3k HP regen, it would be strange if you got a 3k chunk of HP once a second. Let's hope it's fractional, because it would make much more sense to get your HP faster than once a second.
Ok, I was assuming that life regen is applied once per second (in one chunk), because in the beta I would see a little green number pop up once a second. I made the assumption that the visual representation matched the actual regen mechanics. But it could definitely be the case that it's applied in fractions, and that they only show it once per second to make the graphics less cluttered.
If regen applies, say, every 0.1 of a second, then that's great because it means this build will potentially be very viable.
And I think it will be possible to avoid stacking +VIT gear. It might be a common affix, but that doesn't mean you won't be able to find things without it.
If this works, doesn't it mean you won't have to worry about armor and resistances at all? All you have to worry about is reducing the number of hits you take per second. So you could go completely glass cannon and use something like Slow Time and Teleport for when you get surrounded by lots of little people, then destroy them with your crazy damage. You could take Glass Cannon passive as you don't need armor or res, and Illusionist. Teleport will come off cooldown every hit you take.
I'm actually really excited about trying this
Edit: Red Panda, I never saw those 0s popping up, and I had all number options turned on. I was playing a few weeks before open beta. Was that earlier in the beta?
Just because it's possible to do in another game doesn't mean it shouldn't be discussed or that it isn't interesting. I already made the link between this idea and the 55HP Monk from GW, but I didn't abuse anyone for bringing this up.
However I've been thinking about it more and I don't think it will work (as you said), because it doesn't seem possible to reduce the 35% damage, or to heal faster than once per second.
Doesn't mean it shouldn't be discussed though. Maybe you should go play some more Guild Wars.
Look. I'm not critiquing his whole build, just the core idea which I described before.
Yes, you can die with this build. Obviously if you get overwhelmed and take a huge burst of damage in under 1 second, you will die.
I'm simply saying that it's worth trying out. It could be a very effective core of a build.
Sure it's a strange idea, but that doesn't entail it won't be effective. If it's possible to further reduce the 35% damage per hit, you could end up having a very survivable Wizard who can regen their entire HP pool every second.
I also think you could get rid of Mirror Image and Familiar and replace them with stronger offensive spells.
If you're not interested in trying strange ideas, then go play a cookie cutter Wizard build, but don't stay on this thread saying that it's shit and won't work, unless you can provide strong arguments or evidence to support your claims.
I don't think we should dismiss this idea so hastily.
The core idea is that all damage is reduced to 35% of your max HP, and assuming you have a very low HP pool, you can regen all of your HP every second.
This means that if it's possible to reduce incoming damage even further, it will be possible to survive, unless you get hit a huge number of times in one second.
Let's say that you try to maximise your Intelligence (for damage), your Armor and Strength (for damage reduction) and have enough HP regen to refill your health pool every second. Obviously, you won't be getting any more Vitality, so all Vitality is replaced with Strength.
I don't know how it works, but if the 35% incoming damage is affected by other forms of damage reduction (Armor and Strength), then each hit will end up being a very low percentage of your max HP. This means you can potentially survive, I don't know let's say 10 hits per second.
Hmm, Diamond Skin is really interesting with this build.
It just depends on the order that the numbers are applied.
If Diamond Skin blocks damage prior to Force Armor converting the damage to 35% of your max health, then it would probably be useless.
But if Force Armor converts the damage first, then Diamond Skin blocks damage, that would be pretty amazing.
I guess we'll have to wait and see.