I love it. Paired with Deep Freeze on a melee wizard battlemage, it makes cooldown spells way more viable. Frost Nova (synergy...), Diamond Skin, Mirror Image, Slow Time, Archon, and Wave of Force are the spells with meaningful cooldowns. I'd probably take Diamond Skin and Mirror Image, but really any of those would be useful in that build.
As a side note: You might be able to get archon nearly full time now. 120 second cooldown - 20% = 96 seconds. That means you have 81 seconds that you need to bridge between kills and crits. It could probably only be done with perfect gear at level 60, but I still think it could be done.
Edit: Actually, there is a rune that takes Archon's cooldown to 95 seconds. 20% off that is 76 seconds. So it's only 61 kills or crits to bridge the gap.
You call it a melee wizard, I call it a battlemage, so I have no problem if I have to use another spell. But, in any case, you are going to have a trade off between damage and defense. What you are looking for is something having a high defense with a high damage output. That's really not going to happen. What you are doing when you create a battlemage is you are trading damage for defense so that you can run into the middle of a mob.
The other thing is that Spectral Blade is not going to do diddly. Compare it to some of the other spells. 105% multi-target vs. 110% single, 95% bi- or tri-target, 150% for the first target then 45% for the second. Those are just the signature spells which are free with no cooldown. If you compare against spells with a cooldown, you are likely to get more DPS. For example, Frost Nova does 75% multi, but has a 12 second cooldown. If you can cast Spectral Blade once a second hitting only once each time, your Frost Nova would have to hit 5 targets to match.
If you compare to something that does raw damage output, like Fireball, you can essentially cast that twice before you run out of AP. That will be good for taking out a single mob, but not for continuous battles. Even if you build your character around that skill and get lots of AP regen, you are giving up on defense, which means you might not be able to last long enough in Inferno for it to matter.
Really, it's just a matter of playing style. I'd prefer to be in the battle rather than kiting. If it takes a bit longer to kill off a mob, that's fine with me.
your incentive is if you get virtuoso to increase your wand attack by 100%. honestly if the life leech doesn't carry over then the entire build kind of falls apart. it needs very high crit to heal yourself so if you get mauled and you don't crit within a few seconds, your dead without the other life leech. also for the wizard to only use his melee regular attack to hit 1 target at a time for not that much dmg..., melee wizard WOULDNT be viable later in the game, at all. or viable period. so if that is the case then ANY wizard melee build will HAVE to get viruoso as a talent and spectral blade seems pretty pointless, which is why I'm banking on the melee hits life steal effecting spectral blade, in 3 months i will test this and post results.
considering blizzard said the melee wizard is viable end-game. this pretty much has to work for decent killing AND survivability.
I agree and disagree with certain points. At this point I think we just agree to disagree. I think we are on the same page, just on opposite sides of the fence about it. Like I said earlier (and like you just said) we just have to wait 3 months to find out. They might even put melee in the text to make it blatantly obvious that these two skills have synergy. I'm just waiting until there is real proof of it to build around it, not that it makes a very big difference in the builds anyway.
You are misinterpreting what is said in the diary. There are two parts to magic weapon that we need to check if they stack with spectral blade. The first is the actual skill, which increases weapon damage. This is the one that was confirmed in the diary. The weapon damage increase happens before the % weapon damage in the skill, so that's why that works. The second part is the effect in the rune that applies effects to melee attacks. This part could not have been tested because runes are not in the beta.
Honestly, I don't know whether this is going to work or not. No one does except those who work for Blizzard. However, I have played a lot of MTG and I tend to look at these things in a very literal context and in terms of phases and triggers. Spectral Blade is not a melee hit, so it should not trigger an ability for melee hits. However, if Blizzard decides that Spectral Blade is a melee attack, then obviously that will change things. Until they put that into the description or say something about it, I'm going to assume that the abilities triggered by melee hits do not affect spectral blade. You are free to believe otherwise, but you should say that it's been 100% proven, because it has not.
one effect of the ability works with spectral blade, and you think the runed version wont? thats pretty illogical to believe HALF of an ability will work with another but not the other part -_-. zero logic. it says it increases "melee dmg by 20%" so if the MELEE dmg stacks with spectral blade that means its reading spectral blade as MELEE, period. end of story. so OBVIOUSLY the life steal will work.
No, it says increase physical damage by 20% and it only affects melee weapons. Your physical damage might carry over from your weapon, but that is not the same as a melee hit. Bows can do physical damage too, but those are not melee hits. What is illogical is to think that a spell is going to register as a melee hit. If you think that because you are using a melee weapon, your skill will register as a melee hit, then you have to apply that to all the spells, which is not going to happen. If you use a wand, you are no longer doing physical damage. You will be doing arcane damage from the wand (or whatever type of damage wands do) and you would not expect spectral blade to count as a melee hit because it doesn't say anything about melee. The other part of this is that if you allow the runes to affect other skills, you leave no incentive for actually using your weapon as an attack.
Actually those two skills can never stack, at least not if the text on the skills is right. On Spectral Blade it says "Whenever the blades do critical damage...." and on Magic Weapon it says "Melee hits recover X% life". So I honestly don't see how the two skills could ever stack, unless Spectral Blade deals melee damage. In any case Spectral Blade won't have any effect on your normal attack. Also the life steal from Spectral Blade isn't very powerful, since the base damage is low (35% weapon damage) and your crit chance will also be around 35%. The only way to gain any real life from Spectral Blade is to constantly spam it, but the damage dealt is too low for that to be useful.
energy armor + frost nova provides huge crit bonus for this to happen often
Frost Nova yes, Energy Armor no. Even if it gave you +300% precision it would still be rather weak. +25% precision won't even be noticable, this will give you perhaps 1% extra crit chance, provided you have epic gear. With any kind of normal gear the bonus is for all practical purposes non-existant (for a lvl 60 char that is). Unless of course Blizz fixes the way precision works.
I have a very hard time seeing how this could be one of the best builds in the game, but I guess the only way would be to test it come release.
those two skills DO stack, its been 100% proven in the beta. spectral blade does melee dmg. search for the visual blog on a melee wizard on this website, you'll see. spectral blade also attacks 3 separate times at once for 35% wpn dmg (105% total to all enemies it hits) giving it 3 sepparate chances to crit (also proven in beta on that blog). so you life steal WILL stack and yes with this build you constantly spam spectral blade, mirror image, and when your able, meteor. insane life steal will keep you invincible.
You are misinterpreting what is said in the diary. There are two parts to magic weapon that we need to check if they stack with spectral blade. The first is the actual skill, which increases weapon damage. This is the one that was confirmed in the diary. The weapon damage increase happens before the % weapon damage in the skill, so that's why that works. The second part is the effect in the rune that applies effects to melee attacks. This part could not have been tested because runes are not in the beta.
Honestly, I don't know whether this is going to work or not. No one does except those who work for Blizzard. However, I have played a lot of MTG and I tend to look at these things in a very literal context and in terms of phases and triggers. Spectral Blade is not a melee hit, so it should not trigger an ability for melee hits. However, if Blizzard decides that Spectral Blade is a melee attack, then obviously that will change things. Until they put that into the description or say something about it, I'm going to assume that the abilities triggered by melee hits do not affect spectral blade. You are free to believe otherwise, but you should say that it's been 100% proven, because it has not.
I like this build a lot, but wouldn't it be to your advantage to use Mirror Images? No casting cost and they cast your hydras for you, giving you more hydras to help rebuild your AP. With the AP regen plus what you get from arcane damage from 6-9 hydras, you probably would have enough AP regen to cast a new hydra every 2 seconds or so.
well I'm not sure if your images will cast hydra. if they do that would be insane. hydra's all over the screen, might cause lag rofl. but seriously that would be insane
Yea, we don't know any of the spells that they can or cannot cast. I just figure that if it helps a build, then you might as well add it in. I wouldn't create any builds around the assumption that they will be able to cast a certain skill though.
I like this build a lot, but wouldn't it be to your advantage to use Mirror Images? No casting cost and they cast your hydras for you, giving you more hydras to help rebuild your AP. With the AP regen plus what you get from arcane damage from 6-9 hydras, you probably would have enough AP regen to cast a new hydra every 2 seconds or so.
Indigo Meteor is no way better than crimson... Did you add the 990% weapon dmg from the impact? Just take the best wand (think it has 156 attack on it).
Of course I did, did you look at the numbers? Indigo will always out damage any other Meteor rune assuming all 14 hit. Even if only half hit it's still better.
Your assumption that there will be a single enemy is a bad one IMO because it affects a lot of skills differently. For example, Meteor with Indigo is assumed to hit the enemy every time. This is fine if you are really thinking about a mob because you are looking at total potential damage. However, Meteor with Crimson will do your damage calculated to a good number of enemies in a mob. It only takes 3 enemies in the AoE to do roughly the same amount of damage. 4 puts you ahead by a good amount. If you actually do think about a single target, then Indigo will not strike every time. Let's say it strikes 4 times (which would be high IMO), you would be doing around 35k, which is less than meteor with crimson.
I think that it's good to look at some of this stuff, but I think potential damage against a single target is misleading your results.
I think what would lend itself to more customization is for fire spells to only be based off of physical and fire damage from the weapon. Physical spells should only be based off of physical damage. That way, one weapon doesn't fit all builds. It would also lead to people using rubies in fire builds, but not others.
Sorry to burst your bubble but its likely the increases are not additive but multiplicative.
Do you have that backward? (1+x)(1+y) = (1+x+y+xy) > (1+x+y)
I was thinking that a multiplicative boost could be worse off than additive boosts because they would work like 1+x+xy such that two 50% boosts would give a final damage output of 175% as opposed to 225%. I see where you're coming from though, but your formula would give insane damage output and everyone would be in search of that little extra bit of crit, because it would start to boost your entire crit even further.
For example, if we were to bring in one more 50% crit, it would increase from 225% damage to 337.5%. You can see that this exponential growth is probably not what Blizzard wants.
Not to mention, in what order would you apply them? If that 50% crit was applied first, it wouldn't do as much as if it were applied last. But there's no real order that they should go in, which makes me think they all add up at once.
The commutitive property of multiplication disagrees with you. x*(1+y)(1+z)=x(1+z)(1+y)
Meteor with a level 7 Crimson rune does 990% Weapon Damage as fire
Add glass cannon (increase all damage dealt by 20%) and you're looking at 1188% Weapon Damage as fire
Combined with Arcane Dynamo (After 8 signature spells you gain 50% extra damage to next non-sig spell) and you have a whopping 1782% Weapon Damage as fire
I did the math earlier. With 255 wep + crimson meteor you're looking at 3.5k damage if they stand in the aoe for the 3 seconds after impact.
Sorry to burst your bubble but its likely the increases are not additive but multiplicative.
Do you have that backward? (1+x)(1+y) = (1+x+y+xy) > (1+x+y)
Virtuoso seems intriguing now. A top level wand was looking at 300+ damage for the main attack. Virtuoso makes that 600+ and gives you 15 AP. It seems like a useful skill now (don't have to worry about sig spells).
Also, Galvanizing Wizard heals 160 life per second now.
It never ceases to surprise me that people still aren't aware there are no immunities in D3.
It's been posted on this section of the forums alone at least 10 times.
I heard they weren't going to have monsters immune to more than one thing, but I never heard that they were taking immunities out altogether. Is there anything replacing it or are they just going to have high resistance?
should i get teleport with reduced damage taken or familiar with 40% more dmg?
If you believe that spectral blade counts as a melee hit (3 melee hits?), then I would think you'd want to use Crimson instead of Indigo in Magic Weapon to do more damage. Even if you think that the 70% damage is over 3 seconds instead of per second, that's 23% more damage instead of 18%.
I also think you need to worry a bit more about staying alive. Obviously, we will need to wait until the game comes out to see how this build works in the later difficulties, but I'd imagine that staying alive will be the name of the game. I would consider energy armor over storm armor and maybe Alabaster for for magic weapon to recover health quickly.
0
melee wizardbattlemage, it makes cooldown spells way more viable. Frost Nova (synergy...), Diamond Skin, Mirror Image, Slow Time, Archon, and Wave of Force are the spells with meaningful cooldowns. I'd probably take Diamond Skin and Mirror Image, but really any of those would be useful in that build.As a side note: You might be able to get archon nearly full time now. 120 second cooldown - 20% = 96 seconds. That means you have 81 seconds that you need to bridge between kills and crits. It could probably only be done with perfect gear at level 60, but I still think it could be done.
Edit: Actually, there is a rune that takes Archon's cooldown to 95 seconds. 20% off that is 76 seconds. So it's only 61 kills or crits to bridge the gap.
0
The other thing is that Spectral Blade is not going to do diddly. Compare it to some of the other spells. 105% multi-target vs. 110% single, 95% bi- or tri-target, 150% for the first target then 45% for the second. Those are just the signature spells which are free with no cooldown. If you compare against spells with a cooldown, you are likely to get more DPS. For example, Frost Nova does 75% multi, but has a 12 second cooldown. If you can cast Spectral Blade once a second hitting only once each time, your Frost Nova would have to hit 5 targets to match.
If you compare to something that does raw damage output, like Fireball, you can essentially cast that twice before you run out of AP. That will be good for taking out a single mob, but not for continuous battles. Even if you build your character around that skill and get lots of AP regen, you are giving up on defense, which means you might not be able to last long enough in Inferno for it to matter.
Really, it's just a matter of playing style. I'd prefer to be in the battle rather than kiting. If it takes a bit longer to kill off a mob, that's fine with me.
0
I agree and disagree with certain points. At this point I think we just agree to disagree. I think we are on the same page, just on opposite sides of the fence about it. Like I said earlier (and like you just said) we just have to wait 3 months to find out. They might even put melee in the text to make it blatantly obvious that these two skills have synergy. I'm just waiting until there is real proof of it to build around it, not that it makes a very big difference in the builds anyway.
0
No, it says increase physical damage by 20% and it only affects melee weapons. Your physical damage might carry over from your weapon, but that is not the same as a melee hit. Bows can do physical damage too, but those are not melee hits. What is illogical is to think that a spell is going to register as a melee hit. If you think that because you are using a melee weapon, your skill will register as a melee hit, then you have to apply that to all the spells, which is not going to happen. If you use a wand, you are no longer doing physical damage. You will be doing arcane damage from the wand (or whatever type of damage wands do) and you would not expect spectral blade to count as a melee hit because it doesn't say anything about melee. The other part of this is that if you allow the runes to affect other skills, you leave no incentive for actually using your weapon as an attack.
0
http://www.diablofans.com/blog/220/entry-529-melee-wizard-visual-diary/
You are misinterpreting what is said in the diary. There are two parts to magic weapon that we need to check if they stack with spectral blade. The first is the actual skill, which increases weapon damage. This is the one that was confirmed in the diary. The weapon damage increase happens before the % weapon damage in the skill, so that's why that works. The second part is the effect in the rune that applies effects to melee attacks. This part could not have been tested because runes are not in the beta.
Honestly, I don't know whether this is going to work or not. No one does except those who work for Blizzard. However, I have played a lot of MTG and I tend to look at these things in a very literal context and in terms of phases and triggers. Spectral Blade is not a melee hit, so it should not trigger an ability for melee hits. However, if Blizzard decides that Spectral Blade is a melee attack, then obviously that will change things. Until they put that into the description or say something about it, I'm going to assume that the abilities triggered by melee hits do not affect spectral blade. You are free to believe otherwise, but you should say that it's been 100% proven, because it has not.
0
Yea, we don't know any of the spells that they can or cannot cast. I just figure that if it helps a build, then you might as well add it in. I wouldn't create any builds around the assumption that they will be able to cast a certain skill though.
0
0
Unless Meteor hits multiple targets...
0
I think that it's good to look at some of this stuff, but I think potential damage against a single target is misleading your results.
0
0
The commutitive property of multiplication disagrees with you. x*(1+y)(1+z)=x(1+z)(1+y)
0
Do you have that backward? (1+x)(1+y) = (1+x+y+xy) > (1+x+y)
0
Also, Galvanizing Wizard heals 160 life per second now.
0
I heard they weren't going to have monsters immune to more than one thing, but I never heard that they were taking immunities out altogether. Is there anything replacing it or are they just going to have high resistance?
0
If you believe that spectral blade counts as a melee hit (3 melee hits?), then I would think you'd want to use Crimson instead of Indigo in Magic Weapon to do more damage. Even if you think that the 70% damage is over 3 seconds instead of per second, that's 23% more damage instead of 18%.
I also think you need to worry a bit more about staying alive. Obviously, we will need to wait until the game comes out to see how this build works in the later difficulties, but I'd imagine that staying alive will be the name of the game. I would consider energy armor over storm armor and maybe Alabaster for for magic weapon to recover health quickly.