1. Shoulders are still fairly bad - this is one of your best slots for Toughness with Vit / Life% / Armor.
2. Weapon can obviously be improved, Furnace, Sun Keeper, or even just rerolling that IAS to 10% damage on your Maximus. Sun Keeper lets you use FB Source (Fire%) which lets you bring in SoJ in place of RoRG while keeping Magefist (which could use some CHD in a perfect world).
Other than that, you can always target the secondaries on your boots and chest.
You might also try Safe Passage instead of Fracture as you push into higher GRs.
Most of it's already been said here, but here's my take for what it's worth:
-- Toughness. Your damage actually isn't *that bad*, but it won't make a difference as you push into the high 30s and absolutely everything is killing you instantly. There are a number of places you can improve, notably: String of Ears, better Shoulder rolls, %Life in Helm, Armor on Boots instead of Movement Speed (get from Paragon), elemental immunity or Eye of Etlich neck, %ranged or %melee reduction on chest secondary.
-- Weapon/Build. As I said before, your damage isn't bad -- it's just being misused. Double Blazing Hydra build requires a lot of very good gear (notably including Tasker & Theo which is lacking) and while it is capable of getting roughly as high as Furnace/Sun Keeper builds it is generally more frantic / less forgiving. Serpent Sparker can actually be serviceable with two Mammoth Hydras if you don't have a Furnace or Sun Keeper kicking around you could use instead. Teleport will better serve you as Safe Passage and Mirror Image should get swapped out for Magic Weapon - Force Weapon. The images right now are a crutch for you because you don't have the toughness to survive without. Once you solve #1, swap these skills.
-- Templar. You mentioned not being able to go Templar due to not having the immunity relic. As soon as you can, go Templar, give him every skill that snares (esp. Intimidation), and stick him with that Thunderfury, Freeze of Deflection, Ess of Johan, etc. Bring in Bane of the Trapped to go with your Zei's and Toxin or Powerful gems. World of difference.
-- Damage. Again, not bad, but couple areas with big potential gain - SoJ, 10 crit on source, weapon damage ranges (base because of weapon speed of Serpent Sparker and the low elemental damage roll).
We took a demon hunter with us to a rift,he was a new player who we were helping to gear up. And the third we kill drops him a furnace and not just any furnace, a STR and VITA FURNACE with cooldown on it.
This story is BS bc DH cant find the furnance there is 0% chance for them to find it.
Re: Frozen ... Part of it is that at higher GRs, Wormhole starts to get replaced with Safe Passage so there isn't any "double TP". In cave maps, a blue pack with Frozen can stack/stretch it over a painfully-long distance and its damage at 40+ is massive. You definitely want to move, it's just by the time you can manage to get out of it you can take a lot of damage or it can waste your UA.
Maybe I'm more sensitive to it vs. Jailer because Jailer doesn't have the same "oh no, must move" trigger, I can bait out the Jailer while Safe Passage is up, and it procs Illusionist 100% to TP out of the root. At the point Jailer becomes 1-shot (still not at 41 for me), I'll probably move to Force Armor, which does nothing for Frozen ground damage.
@chadwx -- Would you have to reroll the 93% crit damage? That's tough, but Bane of the Trapped with a properly-geared Templar (Thunderfury, etc.) is very very good, especially on RG, because the +% damage is multiplicative like Zei's. Damage-wise it's strictly better than Toxin, but Toxin has the hard-to-quantify benefit of making corrupted angels killable.
Astral Presence, all we're casting is Blizzard, Hydra, and on CD Black Hole. Unless you're overspamming Blizzard or casting it on/behind enemies instead of into their path, I've just never had problems with AP.
The only passive I'd consider swapping GC out for on a standard set is Evocation for more Black Holes. I've tried it both ways, and I'm starting to lean more toward Evocation for higher GR for more CC and to get the toughness back.
Re: Cold, this is primarily just from personal experience on what causes me to take spike damage. It's exclusively for Frozen particularly when a pack carpets an area with Frozen and the damage is immediate and doesn't give you an Illusionist proc. Thunderstorm is more forgiving, with a slight timer I can usually get out of if I have TP up and if the first one does hit you you'll get TP back immediately. Jailer is a beating but not impossible to play around. If I ever get past 41, I'm sure Jailer will start to rise to the top as it approaches 1-shot.
How would you rank the game's legendary amulets in the context of high GR solo rifting? If you could choose one, all primary stats being equal, which would you take? My take to kick things off:
Elemental Immunity - Cold, Lightning, (Eye), Arcane, Poison, Fire. Organized generally by elements that deal the most unavoidable damage. Cold/Lightning pretty close -- Frozen seems to get me more than Thunderstorm but normal monster lightning damage (e.g. Exarch) also a factor. Then Arcane more for Jailer than Arcane, then Poison and Fire as being largely avoidable with proper positioning.
Eye of Etlich - String of Ears equivalent for pesky ranged. Useful if you're going straight mitigation over Force Armor. I'd put it after Cold/Lightning in terms of preference. Having become accustomed to it, though, switching away from it would probably be very painful since some ranged hit like a ton of bricks.
The Traveler's Pledge - Option for those without a good SoJ if combined with a great Compass Rose (which has benefit of being 5-stat) to get +Vit and +50 CHD set bonus.
Rakoff's Glass of Life - I've heard some swear by the amount of globes increase you see with this when there's a fair amount of trash. Got a good one and tried it for a little while. Did see more globes from trash, but often didn't need them. Highly situational.
Flavor of Time - 5 properties, but MS rerolled so you're stuck with CDR.
Hellfire- If it hits one of the top 5 passives you could want (Glass Cannon, Blur, Illusionist, Unstable Anomaly, Evocation), allows you the ability to have the 5th-best passive. Generally underwhelming, pain to grind, etc.
Tal Rasha's / Blackthorne's - If it's the best stats you got, go for it, but don't bother with any of the set bonuses. Basically just a 4-primary leg neck. Everything else is about right here or below (squirt's, rondal's locket, etc.).
I think any prevent dmg amulet is much better then hellfire. There is no passive in this world valuable as element immunity + super strong healing in a game without life leech.
Until you run with a perma CC WD and a zdps monk in your party, preventing all incoming damage if played correct, and you drop any form of toughness/healing and stack damage in every way you can. And if you die, they can res you anyway
Fair enough, agree on that one. Somehow I mostly think about soloing when talking about the game.
Because nobody wants a Wizard holding back their 4-man.
On a side note, what is the viability of SS/TnT with Blazing vs Mammoth and 1h or 2h? Does 1H mammoth still beat it out? Or would I be able to switch? I've got a 2140 devastator with 17% fire(Still waiting for gift so I can roll off socket for +10% damage) and a 2232 SS(Ditto on gift). Since I haven't found a furance or a good maximus yet, I was curious how well it'd do.
Depends on what your 1H is and what you have to go in the slot freed up by using Firebird source. Devastator better for trash, but trash isn't really what's gating you on 40+ -- would probably prefer Sun Keeper if you had a good one kicking around. I clear 40 with both SS/TnT-Blazing and 1H-Mammoth and while they feel about equal in speed, Blazing feels like I'm having to do more / cast more / be more mindful of setup.
So when you next get a gift, probably toss it on the SS and go Blazing unless/until you find a Sun Keeper or Furnace.
Archon doesnt seem to do much damage and you have to stand still. I was messing with it before i completed my set and was very underwhelmed.
As far as the old cm lock down, you cant do it. They can only be frozen for 7.5 secs out of 10 (i think), i expect the zdps wd will receive a similar nerf since they dont suffer from diminishing returns currently.
That much freeze uptime with a good proc coefficient skill mixed in and Rimeheart? I really want Cold to work for some reason, but still probably half the damage as Furnace FB.
I got bored with running the standard cookie-cutter and mixed it up with 50% nearly perfectly-rolled TnT + Serpent Sparker + Blazing Hydra to replace Mammoth. It actually did surprisingly well most of the time - ramps up FB very fast, very good single-target for RG. Even so, highest I could manage was 39 because Blazing's AOE is so small there would be some enemies and RGs (those that spawn minions especially) where the Hydras wouldn't be at full effect on the desired target(s) and would have to get re-cast in a different position.
I still use it for T6 clear because a) it's fun/different and I can leapfrog Blizzard + Hydra without pulling down my old Hydra so I can just keep running and always have a Hydra behind me to wipe up.
Beyond just being a gear/stats/Paragon check, one the biggest factors actually involving player skill for Wizard are kiting and setup. For FB kiting, you're trying to balance several competing concerns (not an exhaustive list):
Staying out of melee.
Dodging ranged attacks.
Dodging charges / leap attacks.
Staying out of ground effects.
Keeping monsters grouped.
Keeping distance for Zei's buff.
Finding the right time to setup / cast to keep damage up and get DoTs capped.
Not kiting too far forward such that your follower leashes and you lose BotT.
Not kiting too far forward such that monsters stop following / your FB DoT falls off.
Not kiting too far forward such that you over pull and get smashed by too many packs.
Most Wizards get the first ones pretty easily - stay away from damage - though even still you see the inexperienced try to "plow through" a horde or Teleport across the breadth of a group of enemies to reach the other side only to take big spikes in damage and be forced to potion/UA/Templar heal.
The biggest exception out of that group, one of the areas I definitely need(ed) to learn to improve, was in anticipating and dodging leap and charge attacks. Big monster charges are perhaps a bit easier - usually preceded by an animation that tells you, "hey, get out of the way!" But leaps like those from Winged Assassins are more anticipatory. I have to know they're coming just because they're on the board and at he appropriate range.
Fortunately, one of the strongest ways to avoid these kinds of attacks is exactly the answer to the "not kiting too far ahead" issues -- zigzag kiting. When you kite in a straight line forward, a pursuing monster is following roughly the same path and this leaves you vulnerable to leaps and straight-line charges. Straight line kiting also creates the fastest distance between yourself and the monsters you want to keep chasing, creating "too far" issues when you've got a Templar snaring them all up. Fine-tuning / taking this to the next level is an exercise of learning when it is right to stretch or compress your amplitude, what to do in narrow hallways or small room maps, etc.
For setup / when to cast, zigzag causes the pursuit vectors of monsters giving chase to also take on something of a zigzag pattern as they adjust to your position. This will cause them to spend additional time in AOE effects like Blizzard, reducing the number of times you need to stop and recast. Reducing casting events, especially in sequence, is critical. Not for AP (though recasting Blizzard infinite times certainly will choke your resources), but rather because hesitation to cast creates a window of vulnerability and recasting Hydra creates damage uptime gaps.
I typically time offensive casting around the Black Hole cooldown (why Evocation can be very good). Placement is also key - if I'm ahead of a pack of monsters and at moderate range, I lead with BH at the head of the pack so that the remaining follow into it and none slip ahead - giving me time for the rest of the setup. I then drop Hydra and Blizzard on or slightly ahead of myself so that the pack is just entering the damage area as they come out of BH (with Strongarm debuff now applied). It can be natural/tempting to drop Blizzard right on the pack's head for instant gratification of damage, but this only gives you roughly half the diameter of the Blizzard for them to walk through and will cause you to have to recast significantly sooner.
I got a decent TnT last night and started playing around with a build that primarily does damage with Serpent Sparker // Blazing Hydra. Blazar for grouping and Apocalypse solely a safety blanket to keep the world aflame make sure DoT doesn't fall off (yay for visual buff in patch!), but the two hydras were capping DoT insanely fast on everything and were ridiculous against RG -- killed an R38 Voracity in just over 2 minutes.
And my Sparker isn't nearly as good as yours.
Love that +Hydra skill damage is multiplicative, unlike other +skill buffs. With Shoulders, Chest, and Source you can stack +45%. Between that, TnT attack speed, +Fire, +Elite from rings, Strongarm, BotT, etc. the damage output stacks very high very quickly. Now it will also apply Efficacious, for extra win.
I'm hoping they made up for some of the drawbacks (fewer VCs) by increasing the legendary drop % by a greater factor than the cost. One can hope, right?
The potential gain from rerolling the INT is low - it caps at 1125 so that's up to +149 INT. Assuming you have around 9000 INT, this amounts to about a 1.7% damage increase and +15 All Resist. Not terribly impressive. And there's no way you want to reroll it to anything other than INT.
The +10% damage is awesome, not going to touch that.
CDR is a full 10% and is a pretty useful stat for a lot of different builds. Argument could be made for rerolling to resource cost reduction, life on hit, VIT etc. if your build doesn't use significant cooldowns -- but those primaries aren't the most useful.
The Fire damage range is close to as low as it can roll. Can be rolled as high as 1439 - 1788, or +258 average damage higher than what you have on there now. With the base weapon damage that's something like an increase from 4850 average damage to 5100 average damage, or roughly a 5.15% damage increase. Considerably better than the +INT.
To me, #4 is the clear-cut winner. Re-roll that fire damage until you're up in the 1400-1700 or better and enjoy a solid 4%+ damage increase.
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1. Shoulders are still fairly bad - this is one of your best slots for Toughness with Vit / Life% / Armor.
2. Weapon can obviously be improved, Furnace, Sun Keeper, or even just rerolling that IAS to 10% damage on your Maximus. Sun Keeper lets you use FB Source (Fire%) which lets you bring in SoJ in place of RoRG while keeping Magefist (which could use some CHD in a perfect world).
Other than that, you can always target the secondaries on your boots and chest.
You might also try Safe Passage instead of Fracture as you push into higher GRs.
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0
-- Toughness. Your damage actually isn't *that bad*, but it won't make a difference as you push into the high 30s and absolutely everything is killing you instantly. There are a number of places you can improve, notably: String of Ears, better Shoulder rolls, %Life in Helm, Armor on Boots instead of Movement Speed (get from Paragon), elemental immunity or Eye of Etlich neck, %ranged or %melee reduction on chest secondary.
-- Weapon/Build. As I said before, your damage isn't bad -- it's just being misused. Double Blazing Hydra build requires a lot of very good gear (notably including Tasker & Theo which is lacking) and while it is capable of getting roughly as high as Furnace/Sun Keeper builds it is generally more frantic / less forgiving. Serpent Sparker can actually be serviceable with two Mammoth Hydras if you don't have a Furnace or Sun Keeper kicking around you could use instead. Teleport will better serve you as Safe Passage and Mirror Image should get swapped out for Magic Weapon - Force Weapon. The images right now are a crutch for you because you don't have the toughness to survive without. Once you solve #1, swap these skills.
-- Templar. You mentioned not being able to go Templar due to not having the immunity relic. As soon as you can, go Templar, give him every skill that snares (esp. Intimidation), and stick him with that Thunderfury, Freeze of Deflection, Ess of Johan, etc. Bring in Bane of the Trapped to go with your Zei's and Toxin or Powerful gems. World of difference.
-- Damage. Again, not bad, but couple areas with big potential gain - SoJ, 10 crit on source, weapon damage ranges (base because of weapon speed of Serpent Sparker and the low elemental damage roll).
(My profile for reference: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/septic-1763/hero/11694132)
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Not all loot is Smart Loot.
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Maybe I'm more sensitive to it vs. Jailer because Jailer doesn't have the same "oh no, must move" trigger, I can bait out the Jailer while Safe Passage is up, and it procs Illusionist 100% to TP out of the root. At the point Jailer becomes 1-shot (still not at 41 for me), I'll probably move to Force Armor, which does nothing for Frozen ground damage.
@chadwx -- Would you have to reroll the 93% crit damage? That's tough, but Bane of the Trapped with a properly-geared Templar (Thunderfury, etc.) is very very good, especially on RG, because the +% damage is multiplicative like Zei's. Damage-wise it's strictly better than Toxin, but Toxin has the hard-to-quantify benefit of making corrupted angels killable.
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http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/septic-1763/hero/11694132
INT/CHD/CC/SOCK -- not max all but definitely serviceable.
Re: Glass Cannon --
- Conflag, as far as anything I've read on the topic (and tested myself) does not snapshot with Firebird DoT at cap, making it fairly useless. Reference: http://www.diablofans.com/forums/diablo-iii-class-forums/wizard-the-ancient-repositories/93608-firebird-dot-mechanics
- Astral Presence, all we're casting is Blizzard, Hydra, and on CD Black Hole. Unless you're overspamming Blizzard or casting it on/behind enemies instead of into their path, I've just never had problems with AP.
- The only passive I'd consider swapping GC out for on a standard set is Evocation for more Black Holes. I've tried it both ways, and I'm starting to lean more toward Evocation for higher GR for more CC and to get the toughness back.
Re: Cold, this is primarily just from personal experience on what causes me to take spike damage. It's exclusively for Frozen particularly when a pack carpets an area with Frozen and the damage is immediate and doesn't give you an Illusionist proc. Thunderstorm is more forgiving, with a slight timer I can usually get out of if I have TP up and if the first one does hit you you'll get TP back immediately. Jailer is a beating but not impossible to play around. If I ever get past 41, I'm sure Jailer will start to rise to the top as it approaches 1-shot.0
Elemental Immunity - Cold, Lightning, (Eye), Arcane, Poison, Fire. Organized generally by elements that deal the most unavoidable damage. Cold/Lightning pretty close -- Frozen seems to get me more than Thunderstorm but normal monster lightning damage (e.g. Exarch) also a factor. Then Arcane more for Jailer than Arcane, then Poison and Fire as being largely avoidable with proper positioning.
Eye of Etlich - String of Ears equivalent for pesky ranged. Useful if you're going straight mitigation over Force Armor. I'd put it after Cold/Lightning in terms of preference. Having become accustomed to it, though, switching away from it would probably be very painful since some ranged hit like a ton of bricks.
The Traveler's Pledge - Option for those without a good SoJ if combined with a great Compass Rose (which has benefit of being 5-stat) to get +Vit and +50 CHD set bonus.
Rakoff's Glass of Life - I've heard some swear by the amount of globes increase you see with this when there's a fair amount of trash. Got a good one and tried it for a little while. Did see more globes from trash, but often didn't need them. Highly situational.
Flavor of Time - 5 properties, but MS rerolled so you're stuck with CDR.
Hellfire- If it hits one of the top 5 passives you could want (Glass Cannon, Blur, Illusionist, Unstable Anomaly, Evocation), allows you the ability to have the 5th-best passive. Generally underwhelming, pain to grind, etc.
Tal Rasha's / Blackthorne's - If it's the best stats you got, go for it, but don't bother with any of the set bonuses. Basically just a 4-primary leg neck. Everything else is about right here or below (squirt's, rondal's locket, etc.).
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0
So when you next get a gift, probably toss it on the SS and go Blazing unless/until you find a Sun Keeper or Furnace.
0
I got bored with running the standard cookie-cutter and mixed it up with 50% nearly perfectly-rolled TnT + Serpent Sparker + Blazing Hydra to replace Mammoth. It actually did surprisingly well most of the time - ramps up FB very fast, very good single-target for RG. Even so, highest I could manage was 39 because Blazing's AOE is so small there would be some enemies and RGs (those that spawn minions especially) where the Hydras wouldn't be at full effect on the desired target(s) and would have to get re-cast in a different position.
I still use it for T6 clear because a) it's fun/different and
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- Staying out of melee.
- Dodging ranged attacks.
- Dodging charges / leap attacks.
- Staying out of ground effects.
- Keeping monsters grouped.
- Keeping distance for Zei's buff.
- Finding the right time to setup / cast to keep damage up and get DoTs capped.
- Not kiting too far forward such that your follower leashes and you lose BotT.
- Not kiting too far forward such that monsters stop following / your FB DoT falls off.
- Not kiting too far forward such that you over pull and get smashed by too many packs.
Most Wizards get the first ones pretty easily - stay away from damage - though even still you see the inexperienced try to "plow through" a horde or Teleport across the breadth of a group of enemies to reach the other side only to take big spikes in damage and be forced to potion/UA/Templar heal.The biggest exception out of that group, one of the areas I definitely need(ed) to learn to improve, was in anticipating and dodging leap and charge attacks. Big monster charges are perhaps a bit easier - usually preceded by an animation that tells you, "hey, get out of the way!" But leaps like those from Winged Assassins are more anticipatory. I have to know they're coming just because they're on the board and at he appropriate range.
Fortunately, one of the strongest ways to avoid these kinds of attacks is exactly the answer to the "not kiting too far ahead" issues -- zigzag kiting. When you kite in a straight line forward, a pursuing monster is following roughly the same path and this leaves you vulnerable to leaps and straight-line charges. Straight line kiting also creates the fastest distance between yourself and the monsters you want to keep chasing, creating "too far" issues when you've got a Templar snaring them all up. Fine-tuning / taking this to the next level is an exercise of learning when it is right to stretch or compress your amplitude, what to do in narrow hallways or small room maps, etc.
For setup / when to cast, zigzag causes the pursuit vectors of monsters giving chase to also take on something of a zigzag pattern as they adjust to your position. This will cause them to spend additional time in AOE effects like Blizzard, reducing the number of times you need to stop and recast. Reducing casting events, especially in sequence, is critical. Not for AP (though recasting Blizzard infinite times certainly will choke your resources), but rather because hesitation to cast creates a window of vulnerability and recasting Hydra creates damage uptime gaps.
I typically time offensive casting around the Black Hole cooldown (why Evocation can be very good). Placement is also key - if I'm ahead of a pack of monsters and at moderate range, I lead with BH at the head of the pack so that the remaining follow into it and none slip ahead - giving me time for the rest of the setup. I then drop Hydra and Blizzard on or slightly ahead of myself so that the pack is just entering the damage area as they come out of BH (with Strongarm debuff now applied). It can be natural/tempting to drop Blizzard right on the pack's head for instant gratification of damage, but this only gives you roughly half the diameter of the Blizzard for them to walk through and will cause you to have to recast significantly sooner.
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0
I got a decent TnT last night and started playing around with a build that primarily does damage with Serpent Sparker // Blazing Hydra. Blazar for grouping and Apocalypse solely a safety blanket to keep the world aflame make sure DoT doesn't fall off (yay for visual buff in patch!), but the two hydras were capping DoT insanely fast on everything and were ridiculous against RG -- killed an R38 Voracity in just over 2 minutes.
And my Sparker isn't nearly as good as yours.
Love that +Hydra skill damage is multiplicative, unlike other +skill buffs. With Shoulders, Chest, and Source you can stack +45%. Between that, TnT attack speed, +Fire, +Elite from rings, Strongarm, BotT, etc. the damage output stacks very high very quickly. Now it will also apply Efficacious, for extra win.
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0
- The potential gain from rerolling the INT is low - it caps at 1125 so that's up to +149 INT. Assuming you have around 9000 INT, this amounts to about a 1.7% damage increase and +15 All Resist. Not terribly impressive. And there's no way you want to reroll it to anything other than INT.
- The +10% damage is awesome, not going to touch that.
- CDR is a full 10% and is a pretty useful stat for a lot of different builds. Argument could be made for rerolling to resource cost reduction, life on hit, VIT etc. if your build doesn't use significant cooldowns -- but those primaries aren't the most useful.
- The Fire damage range is close to as low as it can roll. Can be rolled as high as 1439 - 1788, or +258 average damage higher than what you have on there now. With the base weapon damage that's something like an increase from 4850 average damage to 5100 average damage, or roughly a 5.15% damage increase. Considerably better than the +INT.
To me, #4 is the clear-cut winner. Re-roll that fire damage until you're up in the 1400-1700 or better and enjoy a solid 4%+ damage increase.