There are a lot of speed farm builds but they can be summed up with the following build fragments:
1) Damage - either straight TalRasha6, or TR6/FB4. TR6 builds will normally use arcane orbit/Trium/Unstable, or Chain Reaction/Wand of Woh. TR tends to use Focus/Restraint, Hybrids tend to use Convention/Defensive Ring (Halo or Unity)
2) Unlimited Teleporting - either Aether Walker + Resource Management or Ingeom
3) Movement Speed - Scramble, Warzechian, Illusionist
4) Defense - Goldwrap/Boon or one of Aquilla or OoID and one of Halo of Aryse or Unity
5) Utility - Sages, or Nemesis Bracers, or Both
Take some combination of 1 through 4 and as much of 5 as you can fit. Tailor skill loadouts to taste.
Tradeoffs Between Fragments
Damage
Hybrid spends less time killing enemies, because with TR6 if you even graze a mob with your fire spell they burn forever and die within a few seconds. Straight TalRasha can actually fit in utility items like the Sage set.
Teleporting
No real tradeoffs here. Aetherwalker requires you to slot in some arcane power management systems, Ingeom does nothing for your offense if you don't run EB as your primary damage source, and requires you to find the first elite before you can infinite teleport, and may fall off while you are collecting loot
Movement Speed
Scramble is in anytime you aren't using Halo for defense. Illusionist is always in. Warzechian competes with Nemesis and I basically always take Nemesis especially in Ingeom builds.
Defense
Goldwrap/Boon is less reliable than Aquilla/Orb in their respective builds, but it takes the lowest commitment of resources. Defense rings are hit or miss, they are the most reliable but straight TR builds usually need Focus/Restraint to get the damage to the point where everything is exploding on contact while FB4 does that for the hybrid builds with the mild inconvenience of occasionally backtracking to pick up a legendary dropped by a white mob who was burning in your wake.
As for your particular flavor, I'd strongly recommend dropping FB2 for Deathwatch Mantle and the TR source so you can use an alternate legendary that a TR or sage piece is currently occupying the slot for, like Nilfur's boots, Shame of Delsere, or a nonset source like Orb of Infinite Depth.
I'd also drop Warzechians for Nemesis Bracers to improve DB yield per run and make Ingeom more reliable at low density.
To expand a little on the mechanical advantage being generated, the interaction of TR6 and FB4 is strong on two fronts. First, the TR6 bonus isn't counted when calculating the infinite DoT threshold and second the infinite DoT's damage is amplified by the 6 piece. Meaning if you have 1,000,000 sheet DPS, you need to deal 90M fire damage to cause a target to burn forever. With 4 stacks of TR6 and 20% fire damage on gear, the first second of disintegrate (convergence) at 1M sheet DPS would deal 98.3M fire damage. The target would then burn forever for 756 million fire damage per second until they die.
Basically in any reasonable scenario, whichever fire skill you use for TR is going to instantly stack the full infinite firebird DoT which is going to tick twice as hard as a TR molten impact meteor every second until the target dies.
The build will play like firebirds with some hoop jumping to maintain TR stacks, and its going to evaporate enemies in a way FB6 will simply never do.
The downside is you will need to jump through even more hoops to attain something resembling toughness.
Disintegrate Cost Reduction gear, Diamond Skin (Prism), Storm Armor (Power of the Storm), using the slightly higher proc coefficient runes (Entropy and Intensify), Familiar (Arcanot), and Magic Weapon (Conduit) in roughly that order will reduce the channeling costs of disintegrate and make this build stable with less APoC.
Disintegrate Cost Reduction Affix appears on Rare Helms (up to -5 cost), Stone of Jordan (up to -5 cost), Skull Grasp (up to -4 Cost), and Mara's Kaleidoscope (up to -5 cost), meaning you can actually completely zero the cost of disintegrate from just gear.
Disintegrate is pulse rate 3, meaning it pulses three packets of damage per time it charges the arcane power cost, and has a proc coefficient of 0.167 (no runes, entropy, or intensify), 0.111 (convergence or chaos nexus), or 0.125 (volatility).
Disintegrate Cost * attack speed - coefficient * crit chance * 3 * APoC = AP deficit, which becomes infinitely sustainable when the AP deficit is less than your AP regeneration (10 + 2 for astral presence + 2 Arcanot + 0.5 Templar + 2 4pc Tal'rasha). I'm going Eyebal and guess that the build is fine for low monster power as long as its AP deficit after accounting for regen is less than 10 (for 12ish seconds of channeling uninterrupted) then the build is sustainable.
The OP's profile shows the following:
41.5% Crit Chance
1.68 attacks per second
27 APoC
0 Disintegrate Cost Reduction
Chaos Nexus, Astral Presence, Templar
Coefficiet is 0.111, AP Regen is 12.5 per second
18 * 1.68 - 0.111 * 0.415 * 3 * 27 = AP deficit = 26.5, which actually gives an adjusted deficit of 14 AP per second, meaning 8-9 seconds continuous channeling before AP runs out.
So lets generalize this formula for a second to see if we can determine some the value of some of our various ways to offset the channel cost:
The coefficient for Chaos Nexus is 1/9, and intensify which would be my choice is 1/6. If we assume a 1.0 attack speed and 50% crit chance for a second we see that our formula becomes:
(18 - cost reduction) * 1 - (1/9)*(0.5)*3*APoC = AP deficit for chaos nexus. This tells us that APoC in this case has 1/6th the value of cost reduction. Adding attack speed increases this ratio in favor of cost reduction. 6 APoC is also worth 1 AP regen in the overall result here. Intuitively we see that attack speed will not change the relative value of APoC or AP regen, but will increase the value of cost reduction.
If we switch to Intensify, the value of APoC increases by 50%, meaning switching to intensify allows you to drop 1/3rd of your APoC without a noticable difference, i.e. going from three sources to two. Each 1 point of disintegrate cost reduction equates to 6 * attack speed points of APoC for Chaos Nexus and 4 * attack speed points of APoC for Intensify.
This means if the OP were to change Storm Armor (Shocking Aspect) to Storm Armor (Power of the Storm) he would be able to drop 2 of his 3 APoC sources without reducing his AP efficiency. If he were to swap one of his rings for a -5 Disintegrate Cost Stone of Jordan as well, he could drop APoC entirely without affecting the builds performance, and swaping his DS rune to Prism would have a similar effect.
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.
There is a whole other side to this actually. If affix strength rolls based on monster level, what happens to the items that only went to ilvl 62 before, but can now apparently roll ilvl 63 affixes
For example, the following item could not exist previously:
head
300 Intelligence
200 Vitality
80 Resist All
10 Arcane Power on Crit
6% Crit
Socket
Arcane Power on Crit can't exist on helms other than wizard hats and ilvl 62 items can't get 70-80 resist all, 300 int, 200 vitality, or 6% crit because all of those require level 63 affixes, so the proposed item above, which is better than BiS for a CM wizard, might exist in 1.0.5 where it couldn't in 1.0.4.
Also, be aware that items are rolling affixes "based on" monster level, rather than at monster level. Assuming they had a range of plus or minus 2 from monster level then ilvl 61 mobs would drop loot with affixes ranging from ilvl 59 to ilvl 63, while act 3 inferno mobs would drop loot with affixes ranging from ilvl 61 to 63. Which means loot would be slightly stronger in acts 2 and 3, but you could still get BiS loot from act 1 if you were lucky, the same way it is now.
Either that or every item in act 3 essentially just became ilvl 63.
Remember also that item level still affects base armor and damage values, block values, bonus damage on sources and mojos attack speed ranges on quivers, and such as those are not affixes they are parts of the base item.
Question 1: Some builds do use a signature spell to release the super tornado, but it is not the reason Storm Chaser is used. Storm Chaser is used because it generates the largest number of procs per second for critical mass of any rune of any spell in the wizards arsenal.
Energy Twister ticks 4 times per sceond baseline, accelerated by improved attack speed. Each of these individual ticks has your crit chance and for every rune except Storm Chaser a 0.125 chance on crit to proc effects. This means it has a 12.5% chance per crit to proc critical mass, Storm Armor (Shocking Aspect) and refundes 12.5% of your total life on hit in hp and arcane power on crit in ap. The coefficient on Storm Chaser is different. Some have surmised it is 25% some say 50%, experimentally we don't know, it depends on how often life on hit numbers are sumed before they are displayed on the screen. This difference is likely due to a desire to have a higher proc coefficient on the wind charge tornado, but either a bug in the code causing it to affect base tornados or (more likely in my mind) a programming object for the rune that doesn't have variable space in its structure for a second proc coefficient.
Due to the higher coefficient coupled with Energy Twister's extremely high tick rate (which is done because its movement or the movement of enemies can cause the tornados to have a extremely small windows to deal damage and they don't want it programmed in such a way that an enemy can walk through the tornado without being damaged if the timing is right) means you just get more procs per second with Storm Chaser than with anything else.
Procs per second is what CM is designed to optimize, it means faster refreshes on Frost Nova and Diamond Skin, more damage from Storm Armor (Shocking Aspect), more explosive blasts.
2) Optimize in the following priorities:
Engine Efficency (Crit > APoC [up to about 20] > Life on Hit [up to about 400] > Attack Speed) > EHP (Resist All, Bonus Armor, and Vitality, use a spreadsheet to determine what has better EHP) >> Damage (Int, Crit Damage)
In other words, increase your procs per second first, then work on your toughness, then work on kill speed.
3) Ranged Elites are sort of this build's achillies heel, and why you need to have teleport in your build. Keeping Tornados on them is your key to survival and that is about keeping close to them. You have to do a careful dance around ground AoEs until you get the toughness to stand in them (I am back to this stage thanks to swapping to Shocking Aspect, perhaps sooner than I should be). Changing Explsive Blast's rune from Chain Reaction to Short Fuse or Obliterate will make it easier to put damage on them, as will switching to Storm Armor if you have the gear for it (hint, you don't).
4) I use Teleport (Safe Passage) for these guys, and Frost Nova to freeze them to interrupt their channeled attack, they still kill me more frequently than I would like.
5) Frost Nova lasts 1.05 seconds on elites in inferno (35% of its normal duration), it takes 11 procs per second to freeze lock elites, I can do this to a pack of 3 mobs in my high APoC gear setup (42% crit, 1.85 attacks per second, 29 APoC). This means that against lone elite packs that stay in close range i can full nova lock them and Bone Chill is 15% more damage to them and 20% more damage again from Cold Blooded.
I think what you need to do is swap to a build that is more efficient on damage and then work on your gear to improve your toughness some.
You only have one piece of Arcane Power on Crit gear, if you can find another I recommend swapping to a build without a signature spell, such as the following:
If you can manage the 16-18 aracne power on crit this takes to run effectively it will do much more damage than your version despite lower tooltip damage.
Specific Rune Choice stuff:
Storm Chaser vs Wicked Wind - While wicked wind is easier to aim and keep on target, all of the energy twister runes other than Storm Chaser had their proc coefficients nerfed in 1.0.4 so Storm Chaser, so it is the easiest to proc
Explosive Blast - When you get rolling, spamming explosive blast (chain reaction) will give you more damage per arcane power than any other wizard spell, and with crtiical mass you can cast mutilple per second, resulting in pretty rediculous damage. I finished the game with only 20,000 tooltip DPS and had no trouble killing things in short order, taking not much longer than 30-40 seconds to finish off elite packs unless I had to do a lot of teleporting to stay alive. Some packs I had to swap to a shield bringing my tooltip dps down to 13K, and I could still kill in relatively short order.
Frost Nova (Bone Chill) - when you have 5+ mobs in frost nova range, you are going to have enough ticks to run your cooldown spells as fast as you can spam the buttons, it really isn't an issue of more crit (though you should probably get more crit on your gear if you can manage it). 15% additional damage on top of the 20% from Cold Blooded is what you really leverage to get a lot of damage done really quickly.
Teleport (Safe Passage) - I really can't stress this skill enough. There are three reasons for using this, which make the hardest elite packs much easier to do. Reason one is Safe Passage's damage reduction buff. When your engine is rolling you can tap this button every 4 seconds to keep the damage reduction rolling all the time. 30% reduced damage is absurdly powerful and lowers the tankiness of the gear you need to survive high damage elite packs (Molten, Fire Chains, Desecrator) by a significant amount. The second reason is Frozen, getting out of Frozen to keep your engine rolling is critically important in act 3 and beyond and these packs are a lot easier when you have control of your character for the whole fight. The final reason is ranged mobs and mobs that like to kite you. With Storm Chaser you need to be as close as possible to the target to ensure it starts ticking and elusive mobs can stall your engine if they are in small numbers. Teleporting on top of them and frost nova freezing them gets lets you get the chain rolling and being able to jump out of a melee pack to get the ranged with some damage while tornados in progress roll your cooldowns is sometimes essential to survival.
If you are doing it right a large amount of life on hit, life steal, or the blood magic rune aren't necessary to survive, you should handle incidental damage easily with crystal shell and chain locking mobs in frost nova will prevent the vast majority of damage.
A large part in making this successful however is baseline damage reduction. You have a lot more health than I did (beat diablo with 24.5K hp) but a lot less in terms of defense. When spamming crystal shell your hit points should be largely irrelevant, as they won't break your shell before the next one comes up, at which point it is all about reducing the incoming damage to make those shells last longer.
My stats for farming act 3 and completing inferno are approximately:
21,000 DPS
24,500 HP
900 Resist All (1050 Physical Resist, 1000 Fire Resist)
6600 Armor
38% Crtiical Hit Chance (41% with the scoundrel)
414 Life on Hit
19 Arcane Power on Crit
I could swap out my source and helm for a shield and a wizard hat to make up the arcane power on crit and go to 13.5K DPS, 1000 Resist All, 8000 Armor while keeping Crit and APoC the same, which I had to do for a couple elite packs along the way.
1
There are a lot of speed farm builds but they can be summed up with the following build fragments:
1) Damage - either straight TalRasha6, or TR6/FB4. TR6 builds will normally use arcane orbit/Trium/Unstable, or Chain Reaction/Wand of Woh. TR tends to use Focus/Restraint, Hybrids tend to use Convention/Defensive Ring (Halo or Unity)
2) Unlimited Teleporting - either Aether Walker + Resource Management or Ingeom
3) Movement Speed - Scramble, Warzechian, Illusionist
4) Defense - Goldwrap/Boon or one of Aquilla or OoID and one of Halo of Aryse or Unity
5) Utility - Sages, or Nemesis Bracers, or Both
Take some combination of 1 through 4 and as much of 5 as you can fit. Tailor skill loadouts to taste.
Tradeoffs Between Fragments
Damage
Hybrid spends less time killing enemies, because with TR6 if you even graze a mob with your fire spell they burn forever and die within a few seconds. Straight TalRasha can actually fit in utility items like the Sage set.
Teleporting
No real tradeoffs here. Aetherwalker requires you to slot in some arcane power management systems, Ingeom does nothing for your offense if you don't run EB as your primary damage source, and requires you to find the first elite before you can infinite teleport, and may fall off while you are collecting loot
Movement Speed
Scramble is in anytime you aren't using Halo for defense. Illusionist is always in. Warzechian competes with Nemesis and I basically always take Nemesis especially in Ingeom builds.
Defense
Goldwrap/Boon is less reliable than Aquilla/Orb in their respective builds, but it takes the lowest commitment of resources. Defense rings are hit or miss, they are the most reliable but straight TR builds usually need Focus/Restraint to get the damage to the point where everything is exploding on contact while FB4 does that for the hybrid builds with the mild inconvenience of occasionally backtracking to pick up a legendary dropped by a white mob who was burning in your wake.
As for your particular flavor, I'd strongly recommend dropping FB2 for Deathwatch Mantle and the TR source so you can use an alternate legendary that a TR or sage piece is currently occupying the slot for, like Nilfur's boots, Shame of Delsere, or a nonset source like Orb of Infinite Depth.
I'd also drop Warzechians for Nemesis Bracers to improve DB yield per run and make Ingeom more reliable at low density.
1
To expand a little on the mechanical advantage being generated, the interaction of TR6 and FB4 is strong on two fronts. First, the TR6 bonus isn't counted when calculating the infinite DoT threshold and second the infinite DoT's damage is amplified by the 6 piece. Meaning if you have 1,000,000 sheet DPS, you need to deal 90M fire damage to cause a target to burn forever. With 4 stacks of TR6 and 20% fire damage on gear, the first second of disintegrate (convergence) at 1M sheet DPS would deal 98.3M fire damage. The target would then burn forever for 756 million fire damage per second until they die.
Basically in any reasonable scenario, whichever fire skill you use for TR is going to instantly stack the full infinite firebird DoT which is going to tick twice as hard as a TR molten impact meteor every second until the target dies.
The build will play like firebirds with some hoop jumping to maintain TR stacks, and its going to evaporate enemies in a way FB6 will simply never do.
The downside is you will need to jump through even more hoops to attain something resembling toughness.
1
Disintegrate Cost Reduction Affix appears on Rare Helms (up to -5 cost), Stone of Jordan (up to -5 cost), Skull Grasp (up to -4 Cost), and Mara's Kaleidoscope (up to -5 cost), meaning you can actually completely zero the cost of disintegrate from just gear.
Disintegrate is pulse rate 3, meaning it pulses three packets of damage per time it charges the arcane power cost, and has a proc coefficient of 0.167 (no runes, entropy, or intensify), 0.111 (convergence or chaos nexus), or 0.125 (volatility).
Disintegrate Cost * attack speed - coefficient * crit chance * 3 * APoC = AP deficit, which becomes infinitely sustainable when the AP deficit is less than your AP regeneration (10 + 2 for astral presence + 2 Arcanot + 0.5 Templar + 2 4pc Tal'rasha). I'm going Eyebal and guess that the build is fine for low monster power as long as its AP deficit after accounting for regen is less than 10 (for 12ish seconds of channeling uninterrupted) then the build is sustainable.
The OP's profile shows the following:
41.5% Crit Chance
1.68 attacks per second
27 APoC
0 Disintegrate Cost Reduction
Chaos Nexus, Astral Presence, Templar
Coefficiet is 0.111, AP Regen is 12.5 per second
18 * 1.68 - 0.111 * 0.415 * 3 * 27 = AP deficit = 26.5, which actually gives an adjusted deficit of 14 AP per second, meaning 8-9 seconds continuous channeling before AP runs out.
So lets generalize this formula for a second to see if we can determine some the value of some of our various ways to offset the channel cost:
The coefficient for Chaos Nexus is 1/9, and intensify which would be my choice is 1/6. If we assume a 1.0 attack speed and 50% crit chance for a second we see that our formula becomes:
(18 - cost reduction) * 1 - (1/9)*(0.5)*3*APoC = AP deficit for chaos nexus. This tells us that APoC in this case has 1/6th the value of cost reduction. Adding attack speed increases this ratio in favor of cost reduction. 6 APoC is also worth 1 AP regen in the overall result here. Intuitively we see that attack speed will not change the relative value of APoC or AP regen, but will increase the value of cost reduction.
If we switch to Intensify, the value of APoC increases by 50%, meaning switching to intensify allows you to drop 1/3rd of your APoC without a noticable difference, i.e. going from three sources to two. Each 1 point of disintegrate cost reduction equates to 6 * attack speed points of APoC for Chaos Nexus and 4 * attack speed points of APoC for Intensify.
This means if the OP were to change Storm Armor (Shocking Aspect) to Storm Armor (Power of the Storm) he would be able to drop 2 of his 3 APoC sources without reducing his AP efficiency. If he were to swap one of his rings for a -5 Disintegrate Cost Stone of Jordan as well, he could drop APoC entirely without affecting the builds performance, and swaping his DS rune to Prism would have a similar effect.
1
1
For reference:
Rings
Amulets
Wizard Hats
Spirit Stones
Voodoo Masks
Cloaks
Mighty Belts
Sources
Mojos
Quivers
For example, the following item could not exist previously:
head
300 Intelligence
200 Vitality
80 Resist All
10 Arcane Power on Crit
6% Crit
Socket
Arcane Power on Crit can't exist on helms other than wizard hats and ilvl 62 items can't get 70-80 resist all, 300 int, 200 vitality, or 6% crit because all of those require level 63 affixes, so the proposed item above, which is better than BiS for a CM wizard, might exist in 1.0.5 where it couldn't in 1.0.4.
Also, be aware that items are rolling affixes "based on" monster level, rather than at monster level. Assuming they had a range of plus or minus 2 from monster level then ilvl 61 mobs would drop loot with affixes ranging from ilvl 59 to ilvl 63, while act 3 inferno mobs would drop loot with affixes ranging from ilvl 61 to 63. Which means loot would be slightly stronger in acts 2 and 3, but you could still get BiS loot from act 1 if you were lucky, the same way it is now.
Either that or every item in act 3 essentially just became ilvl 63.
Remember also that item level still affects base armor and damage values, block values, bonus damage on sources and mojos attack speed ranges on quivers, and such as those are not affixes they are parts of the base item.
1
Energy Twister ticks 4 times per sceond baseline, accelerated by improved attack speed. Each of these individual ticks has your crit chance and for every rune except Storm Chaser a 0.125 chance on crit to proc effects. This means it has a 12.5% chance per crit to proc critical mass, Storm Armor (Shocking Aspect) and refundes 12.5% of your total life on hit in hp and arcane power on crit in ap. The coefficient on Storm Chaser is different. Some have surmised it is 25% some say 50%, experimentally we don't know, it depends on how often life on hit numbers are sumed before they are displayed on the screen. This difference is likely due to a desire to have a higher proc coefficient on the wind charge tornado, but either a bug in the code causing it to affect base tornados or (more likely in my mind) a programming object for the rune that doesn't have variable space in its structure for a second proc coefficient.
Due to the higher coefficient coupled with Energy Twister's extremely high tick rate (which is done because its movement or the movement of enemies can cause the tornados to have a extremely small windows to deal damage and they don't want it programmed in such a way that an enemy can walk through the tornado without being damaged if the timing is right) means you just get more procs per second with Storm Chaser than with anything else.
Procs per second is what CM is designed to optimize, it means faster refreshes on Frost Nova and Diamond Skin, more damage from Storm Armor (Shocking Aspect), more explosive blasts.
2) Optimize in the following priorities:
Engine Efficency (Crit > APoC [up to about 20] > Life on Hit [up to about 400] > Attack Speed) > EHP (Resist All, Bonus Armor, and Vitality, use a spreadsheet to determine what has better EHP) >> Damage (Int, Crit Damage)
In other words, increase your procs per second first, then work on your toughness, then work on kill speed.
3) Ranged Elites are sort of this build's achillies heel, and why you need to have teleport in your build. Keeping Tornados on them is your key to survival and that is about keeping close to them. You have to do a careful dance around ground AoEs until you get the toughness to stand in them (I am back to this stage thanks to swapping to Shocking Aspect, perhaps sooner than I should be). Changing Explsive Blast's rune from Chain Reaction to Short Fuse or Obliterate will make it easier to put damage on them, as will switching to Storm Armor if you have the gear for it (hint, you don't).
4) I use Teleport (Safe Passage) for these guys, and Frost Nova to freeze them to interrupt their channeled attack, they still kill me more frequently than I would like.
5) Frost Nova lasts 1.05 seconds on elites in inferno (35% of its normal duration), it takes 11 procs per second to freeze lock elites, I can do this to a pack of 3 mobs in my high APoC gear setup (42% crit, 1.85 attacks per second, 29 APoC). This means that against lone elite packs that stay in close range i can full nova lock them and Bone Chill is 15% more damage to them and 20% more damage again from Cold Blooded.
1
You only have one piece of Arcane Power on Crit gear, if you can find another I recommend swapping to a build without a signature spell, such as the following:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#VhXYOQ!gWZ!ccacca
If you can manage the 16-18 aracne power on crit this takes to run effectively it will do much more damage than your version despite lower tooltip damage.
Specific Rune Choice stuff:
Storm Chaser vs Wicked Wind - While wicked wind is easier to aim and keep on target, all of the energy twister runes other than Storm Chaser had their proc coefficients nerfed in 1.0.4 so Storm Chaser, so it is the easiest to proc
Explosive Blast - When you get rolling, spamming explosive blast (chain reaction) will give you more damage per arcane power than any other wizard spell, and with crtiical mass you can cast mutilple per second, resulting in pretty rediculous damage. I finished the game with only 20,000 tooltip DPS and had no trouble killing things in short order, taking not much longer than 30-40 seconds to finish off elite packs unless I had to do a lot of teleporting to stay alive. Some packs I had to swap to a shield bringing my tooltip dps down to 13K, and I could still kill in relatively short order.
Frost Nova (Bone Chill) - when you have 5+ mobs in frost nova range, you are going to have enough ticks to run your cooldown spells as fast as you can spam the buttons, it really isn't an issue of more crit (though you should probably get more crit on your gear if you can manage it). 15% additional damage on top of the 20% from Cold Blooded is what you really leverage to get a lot of damage done really quickly.
Teleport (Safe Passage) - I really can't stress this skill enough. There are three reasons for using this, which make the hardest elite packs much easier to do. Reason one is Safe Passage's damage reduction buff. When your engine is rolling you can tap this button every 4 seconds to keep the damage reduction rolling all the time. 30% reduced damage is absurdly powerful and lowers the tankiness of the gear you need to survive high damage elite packs (Molten, Fire Chains, Desecrator) by a significant amount. The second reason is Frozen, getting out of Frozen to keep your engine rolling is critically important in act 3 and beyond and these packs are a lot easier when you have control of your character for the whole fight. The final reason is ranged mobs and mobs that like to kite you. With Storm Chaser you need to be as close as possible to the target to ensure it starts ticking and elusive mobs can stall your engine if they are in small numbers. Teleporting on top of them and frost nova freezing them gets lets you get the chain rolling and being able to jump out of a melee pack to get the ranged with some damage while tornados in progress roll your cooldowns is sometimes essential to survival.
If you are doing it right a large amount of life on hit, life steal, or the blood magic rune aren't necessary to survive, you should handle incidental damage easily with crystal shell and chain locking mobs in frost nova will prevent the vast majority of damage.
A large part in making this successful however is baseline damage reduction. You have a lot more health than I did (beat diablo with 24.5K hp) but a lot less in terms of defense. When spamming crystal shell your hit points should be largely irrelevant, as they won't break your shell before the next one comes up, at which point it is all about reducing the incoming damage to make those shells last longer.
My stats for farming act 3 and completing inferno are approximately:
21,000 DPS
24,500 HP
900 Resist All (1050 Physical Resist, 1000 Fire Resist)
6600 Armor
38% Crtiical Hit Chance (41% with the scoundrel)
414 Life on Hit
19 Arcane Power on Crit
I could swap out my source and helm for a shield and a wizard hat to make up the arcane power on crit and go to 13.5K DPS, 1000 Resist All, 8000 Armor while keeping Crit and APoC the same, which I had to do for a couple elite packs along the way.
Hope some of that info is helpful.