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Quote from Wakka9000

i cry evrtm when i rid tis ='(

With your math and logic, there is nothing to discus with you. And I doubt that you saw at least 5% of change log. Just drop this game.

I really hope you're trying to be ironic with that first statement or there is probably no use in trying to explain the principal to you if you think "evrtm i rid tis" is a coherent form of communication.

It is reasonably cheap to get a basic set to use critical mass build on live, I don't disagree. However live builds perform very well with respect to gear required. You can easily farm act 3 with under 2 million gold worth of gear (and I have seen videos of sets produced for under 1 million performing reasonably in act 3). However, to get the same performance using energy twister on the PTR that you get out of live strom chaser requires you to generate 4 times as many ticks (since ET has 1/4th the coefficient) and since the nerfs to meteor it remains the most effective proc producing skill in the wizard arsenal. Assuming 35% crit, and 1.5 attack speed would do the trick before, it would now take 70% crit, and 3.0 attack speed to get the same level or performance. I don't think I really need to tell you that 70% crit and 3.0 attack speed is actually not possible with current gear (somewhere around 60% crit is the unbuffed maximum and you could add 8% to energy twister specifically and get close). So billions of gold in gear for the same performance is hyperbole I grant you.

Now what I assume you are getting at is part and parcel with these changes comes a nerf to inferno (and if you've played on the PTR as I have, a substantial one). However, the bottom line is this. Any build that could do act 3 before can do act 3 on MP3 on the PTR if it wasn't nerfed, or act 1 on MP4 or 5, however critical mass basically can't. If you want to say too bad, go down to MP1 and farm there, well you don't need critical mass there, its like playing in act 3 hell is now, just stack damage and nuke everything, you don't even need diamond skin let alone critical mass.

I liked the frantic pace of CM builds, and the idea of being able to leverage syngery to out perform my gear level. Thats gone now, there is essentially no reason to use critical mass, its not effective enough for high monster power and not necessary at low monster power.

Quote from Wakka9000

Quote from DisposableHeero

I guess the definition of "works fine" is billions of gold in gear to get above MP3. They really are trying to make me quit this game.

L2P
This build costs less than 5 mil now

Discussing future builds not present builds brosef, glad you are following along.

They essentially increased the gear requirement by a factor of four for energy twister, and that is still stronger than the new coefficients on meteor, and I laughed a little inside when they nerfed spectral blades because comparatively it is terrible.

CC locking breaks higher monster power settings which is likely the motivation for these nerfs, but nerfing the coefficient instead of the CC lock is breaking the builds at the low end. Its an unavoidable cost of their lazy programming making every remotely RNG element of their game dependant on a single static coefficient for each spell. This after they released a block saying infinite CC builds would be watched but wouldn't be changed in 1.0.5.

Quote from singjai

If you stack about 2.0 total APS, Wicked Wind works fine with 500-600 LOH and 19APoC,

CM Wizard still works fine.

I guess the definition of "works fine" is billions of gold in gear to get above MP3. They really are trying to make me quit this game.

Quote from chaoslux

I'm prettty sure the original intention for Critical Mass was "Hey, if you have lots of crit gear, you'll have shorter cooldowns! (Better benefit than Evocation), not "Hey, if you have crit gear, you never have cooldowns. Ever."

They had best buff the effect of pretty much every skill in the defensive tree substantially then because they are all garbage other than teleport at actually defending you in high end content without using critical mass to spam them.

Testing on the PTR, and found using Diamond Skin (Prism) makes this much more manageable arcane power wise. Liquify appears to be the best rune for procs and damage.

Found some more information on this here: http://eu.battle.net...opic/5208511084

Ray of Frost has a tick coefficient of 3, meaning it produces thrice your attack speed in ticks per second, and ticks 3 times before it drains its arcane power cost again.

I'm going to take some pie in the sky stats and model this quickly. A theoretical wizard with 18 Arcane Power on Crit, 40% Crit Chance, and 1.7 attacks per second.

Sleet Storm will tick 5.1 times per second, and cost 27.2 arcane power per second. The baseline regeneration of a wizard is 10 arcane power per second, netting us a deficit of 17.2 arcane power per second of combat. Each second of combat against a single target in which we channel we strike 5.1 times, generating on average 2.04 critical hits. Our 18 APoC and the coefficient of 0.185 causes us to generate 3.33 arcane power return per critical hit, or 6.79 arcane power per second, reducing our deficit to 10.41 AP per second.

This gives us just over 10 seconds of continuous channel time against a single target. We also generate 0.3774 critical mass procs per second, making our cooldown spells cool 1.3774 seconds per second, adjusting the cooldown of diamond skin to 10.89 seconds.

If we use Diamond Skin (Prism) we get 55% uptime (6 second duration, 10.89 second effective cooldown). This effectively reduces the cost of Ray of Frost by 3.85 arcane power. This reduces our mana deficit by 6.56 arcane power per second bringing it down to 3.85 per second, which means 26 seconds of unterrupted channel time.

Against two targets, we start to see the right thresholds:

Two targets produces 4.08 critical hits per second, resulting in 13.58 arcane power per second, reducing of deficit to 3.62 arcane power per second, giving us a channel time of 27.6 seconds. If we add in the astral presence passive this time instead of the slightly more effective but higher opportunity cost Prism skin, our arcane power deficit shrinks to 1.62 arcane power per second, and we get a channel time of 74 seconds, which should be plenty.

If I redo the calculations for slightly better gear, 2 attacks per second, 45% crit chance, 20 APoC (sticking with 2 soruces), we find the following numbers:

Single Target
6 ticks per second, 32 AP per second, 22 AP per second deficit, 12.01 AP per second after APoC. This results in less sustainable channel time than the lesser geared wizard, so we want to stay away somewhat from attack speed gear and optimize crit first.
0.4995 crit mass procs per second, 10 second effective cooldown on diamond skin
4.667 AP cost reduction from Prism, resulting a 9.333 AP deficit reduction, leaving 2.67 AP/second, or 37 second channel time

Two targets
12 ticks per second, 32 AP per second, 22 AP per second deficit, 4.02 AP per second after APoC, 2.02 with Astral Presence, 60 seconds with astral presence, and with prism we would be generating net AP letting us add in explosive blast spam.

In terms of AP sustainability, Prism > Power of the Storm > Astral presence > Conduit. Sustainability for 3 or more targets can be attained at virtually any gear level. Sustainability at 2 targets can be done with 2 APoC sources and Prism/Critical mass and 40-45% crit chance. Sustainability at 3 targets can be done at very low gear level, which is a solid plus for farming elite packs.

How you build it will depend on what you intend to farm.

I'm not sold on shocking aspect being big for this anymore, this produces around a third of a proc per second per target for critical mass and shocking aspect which is substantially lower than the 3-5 procs per second against a single target wicked wind can generate at similar gear levels, so this is really going to be a melt face DPS build like archon more than a critical mass build and is probably going to bank on high DPS and life steal to survive more so than refreshing diamond skin (and its not going to nova lock because you drop the channel when you cast nova, while twisters and meteors still tick.

Attack Speed works against you a little bit in terms of arcane power sustainability but it works for you in terms of delivering DPS, so its a neutral stat, you'd weight your stats towards crit, but you wouldn't avoid IAS, and if you were less worried about the critical mass aspect, using a two hander is distinctly possible here.

Having 1.0 attacks per second means you start with only an AP deficit of 6 AP/second, which with just astral presence is sustainable for 30 seconds of channeling. If we're talking 100K DPS at 333% per second before modifiers and over 500% after them, then you're talking 15 million hp enemies before you have to stop and take a breather single target.

Quote from TheDemokin

Quote from DisposableHeero

though that would favor a high attack speed setup which will make for more arcane power consumption.

On the second thought - how exactly does AIS come into the picture? Channeled spells do not tick faster based on attack speed - they have a fixed tick rate, shocking aspect should be 'passively' shocking attackers independently of attack speed.

Channeled Spells and DoTs do tick faster. They have an unknown pulse rate baseline that scales with attack speed, however their damage is almalgamated into 0.5 second chunks that appear on screen. That rate of damage being output to the screen is a fixed rate, but the pulse rate under the hood is affected by attack speed. For reference:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/3595370796#10

I beleive its been confirmed that the arcane power cost is equal to the base AP cost multiplied by your tooltip attacks per second. More IAS means faster AP drain but it also causes a faster return from APoC for a given crit rate, so there is some combination of crit chance and APoC that will reach an equilibrium. If you're going for a CM based build, I think most of your AP sustainability concerns can be removed by running Diamond Skin (Prism).

A channeled spell is inferior to a cast and forget ticking spell for CM, so I would not plan for CM to be the center of the build, and make it more about life steal and insane face melting (or freezing in this case) DPS, however, CM + DS(Prism) will give you the largest boost in channel sustainability available to a wizard without changing your stat priority.

Things not to discount in your testing:

1) I have heard reports that volume of loot steps up dramatically at higher monster power, I'm not sure what your metrics for analyzing drops are, or how many runs you are doing to validate your findings beyond just RNG.
2) Do not discount the possibility that running Act 3 Hell on very high MP could potentially be more efficient than any setting in inferno.
3) While infinite archon thrives on the mob density in Act 3, do not dismiss the possibility that farming acts 1 or 2 at different monster powers could yield stronger results for other builds. There was an interesting proposal on this forum for a sans archon build attaining similar damage output using the newly buffed ray of frost (sleet storm) and getting slightly better damage returns than disintegration wave does without having to manage the archon buff.

Meteor is theoretically just slightly better than Energy Twister is as a baseline in terms of procs per second, though Liquify is potentially much higher. It has a barrier to entry however:

The 1.25 second onset delay with better than about 1.6 attacks per second means three meteor casts before you start getting any damage or arcane power refunded, so you need to have an arcane power pool big enough to support three meteor casts.

Thats fine except the only rune of meteor that competes with old wicked wind or storm chaser in proc efficiency is not star pact, its liquify, which means you need either a lot of +max arcane power and energy tap, or more efficiently, you need gear reducing the cost of meteor.

On the plus side, using meteor as your proc carrier with Shocking Aspect and Diamond Shards and explosive blast would deal incredible damage.

I might if I can find say, a -5 Meteor Cost/+15 Max Arcane Power Oculus have to give this a try:

http://us.battle.net...XYTQ!gWe!cccYca

consider that the loss of the glove slot represents a loss of a signficant amount of potentail crit chance, crit damage, and attack speed to use frosties, and not everyone is going to have a perfect pair.

Archon (Improved Archon) lasers at 375% weapon damage and doesn't stack Cold Blooded on top of Glass Cannon, Force Weapon and Sparkflint. This compares favorably to that in terms of damage output so it should have similar results with respect to life steal without having a large buff to manage. I'd also consider that a 1.875 proc coefficient on a DoT is stronger than wicked wind which is still used to pretty strong effect at high crit chance with Shocking Aspect, which could add considerably more damage to your channel, though that would favor a high attack speed setup which will make for more arcane power consumption.

If this triggers shocking aspect well on the PTR with a high attack speed and crit setup, I'd consider swapping Frost Nova (Bone Chill) for Diamond Skin (Prism) and Astral Presence for Critical Mass. You can cast Diamond Skin mid channel which you can't do with Frost Nova which seems like it would make this more useful.

Edit: With respect to ranged mobs, you are going to have to chase them but you have a 60%, 4 second slow as your primary attack and teleport (potentially with critical mass), so I don't think getting them with sleet will be a problem if you melt them as fast as I think you will, I'd try the following:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#ZQXTjS!WYX!YYZcac

With Storm Chaser having its coefficient brought down to match other energy twister runes it ceases to be ideal for CM. Try using Wicked Wind or Mistral Breeze for better results. The build may be dead without intervention or may be reserved for those with absurd attack speed and crit values.

And the expected nerf to storm chaser now makes this largely a moot point as archon is now the only viable non-kiting build.

um, correct me if I'm wrong but....

Affixes on items will now roll their level based on the level of the monster killed (rather than the item’s level)

Doesn't this mean that every rare that drops in act 3 is now essentially ilvl 63 since they can roll lvl 63 affixes.

Furthermore does this mean that wizard hats, voodoo masks, etc can now roll ilvl 63 affixes?

for example, could this hotness exist?:

Wizard Hat
300 Intelligence
200 Vitality
80 Resist All
10 Arcane Power on Crit
6% Crit
Socket

With the patch notes up there is nothing to indicate the armor and resistance bonuses inherent to archon form have recieved the same nerfs that energy armor and comparable skills (for reference, even the enchantress' powered armor buff got hit by the nerf bat). Combined with the changes to monster damage in inferno and the ability to scale up monster damage and hp numbers for increased magic find does this make Archon the dominant build for inferno wizards of all gear levels?

Quote from Jaetch

Switching out armors will definitely be something to look for at high EHP levels, especially after patch 1.0.5 hits. How will it work? Only time will tell right now.

The entire discussion on critical mass builds may be moot if they nerf the storm chaser coefficient in 1.0.5 as many have suggested they are likely to. On the other hand I can attest to Shocking Aspect being viable in current mechanics at only a little higher than my current EHP level to be comfortable (I currently run it but find myself a little too fragile, but can't bring myself to go back to energy armor) which according to the spreadsheet is around 225K EHP.

It is a massive increase in damage output though, especially when facing elites where you have 3 or less targets for the majority of the fight.