What builds are doing well in T6?
I'm happily playing a Disintegrate build in T1, but I want to start keeping an eye out for gear for other builds I may want to use later.
Posted Apr 16, 2014, 11:46 PM UTC
2325
I'm not ubergeared, but I can do t3 no problem with my disintegratebuild. T4 works but I'm only at 1m dps so it's slow. Viable for t6? No clue.. But arcane dynamo works with disintegrate now AND with archon.. Stuff melts pretty fast! I think disintegrate builds can work in t6 with the right setup but it's very gear dependant - like most classes :) play what you enjoy! I'd rather slog through t6 in the end with a fun build than hop on the flavor of the month cookie cutter for ease. Where's the pride in that?
3
I'm pretty much changing my build up by the day, and/or each time I play. Been using disintegrate in groups so I feel like I'm doing something, but I know deep down inside I'm really not.. :[
3
Copy/pasting what I sent in PMs..
I'm on my phone now, but I use familiar sparkflint, arcane armor with crit chance, weapon buff with 20% increase in damage, electrocute/arc disintegrate/entropy and archon. Passives are arcane dynamo, elemental exposure, the one where standing still buffs your dmg/toughness and audacity (because of arc and entropy). Arc lightning buffs the stacks fast (and also dps nicely for a signature), when you have 5 (1sec) let loose on disintegrate. With the new fix your entire channeled disintegrate spell will have 60% dmg increase. With entropy you hit everything. Stuff dies too fast to hurt you. For elites/champs, 5 stacks of dynamo and pop archon. Ticks for 20mill+ for me. Buff will keep going as long as you channel. Will break if you stop, run out of AP, move or get stunned. Quick to build up again with arc though. Don't need to hit enemies even - can fire it in the air to build stack. I recommend spraying enemies once though, to get elemental exposure going, your familiar will add fire and ofc arcane is disintegrate. It's a super buff build. If you're too anxious about short range, switch to long range signature and disintegrate at expense of dmg and go for the arcane slow. Gives nice cc for higher difficulty. Sorry for bad format - again, on the phone. Oh, and you want AP on crit hit for this build. Chantados force source is nice. I think that's what it's called :) and ofc high crit and crit dmg with attack speed the third offensive priority.
2
Just curious, what is your disintegrate build? I have some Arcane gear that I should probably start using
2
Not the person you responded to, but here is an example of an Arcane wizard. My wizard Not all that great, but I can handle T3. I have around 950k dps and 7 million toughness with 300k life. This is without Unwavering Will passive.
The weapon I'm using is used as a test, to see if the reduced resource cost is worth a 5% dps loss. So far it doesn't seem so, since I only ever run out of arcane power on riftbosses.
1
I'm on my phone now, but I use familiar sparkflint, arcane armor with crit chance, weapon buff with 20% increase in damage, electrocute/arc disintegrate/entropy and archon. Passives are arcane dynamo, elemental exposure, the one where standing still buffs your dmg/toughness and audacity (because of arc and entropy). Arc lightning buffs the stacks fast (and also dps nicely for a signature), when you have 5 (1sec) let loose on disintegrate. With the new fix your entire channeled disintegrate spell will have 60% dmg increase. With entropy you hit everything. Stuff dies too fast to hurt you. For elites/champs, 5 stacks of dynamo and pop archon. Ticks for 20mill+ for me. Buff will keep going as long as you channel. Will break if you stop, run out of AP, move or get stunned. Quick to build up again with arc though. Don't need to hit enemies even - can fire it in the air to build stack. I recommend spraying enemies once though, to get elemental exposure going, your familiar will add fire and ofc arcane is disintegrate. It's a super buff build. If you're too anxious about short range, switch to long range signature and disintegrate at expense of dmg and go for the arcane slow. Gives nice cc for higher difficulty. Sorry for bad format - again, on the phone. Oh, and you want AP on crit hit for this build. Chantados force source is nice. I think that's what it's called :) and ofc high crit and crit dmg with attack speed the third offensive priority.
1
[deleted]
1
As it stands, Wizards aren't really doing so great in T6. We melt our way through the lower Torments but in the very very end-game, Barbarians Crusaders and Demon Hunters have us completely outclassed.
3
Really? Most of the T6 groups I see say that Meteor wizards are OP as fuck.
1
its an issue of survivability, not DPS
2
AT wiz with soj and 2 piece aughild (with set reduce ring) and 3 pice (you get 4 set bonus) does pretty well. You can even get in archon if you have 3 pieces of vyr. This is a very strong build.
The other t6 build is mm conflagurate with mirror ball, though i havent tested it myself.
Doesnt really seem like there are many t6 viable builds atm.
1
The only way to do T6 efficiently is to maximise your weapon damage % per second. Most classes do not have many options for this.
Pet builds have a massive advantage due to the Pets being bonus damage on top of your own spenders (e.g. Full Fetish Army = 185 * 20 = 3700% DPS + 425% from Vampire Bats). Unfortunately the only "pets" that Wizard have are Mirror Image (which deal terrible damage) and Hydra (only get 1 or 2, which is about 300%-600% DPS and requires a bit of upkeep).
The other way to max out your weapon damage % per second is with overpowered torment sets. For example, the Barbarian Earthquake set nets you an extra 1300%-2600% DPS on top of your normal 640% HotAs (and you can complete IK set at the same time to get 500-1000% CotA pets). Again, Wizard falls short here, as Tals gives minimal DPS, Vyr's only works when you can melt most mobs already (good luck doing that on T6 with only 790% DPS) and the Phoenix set is a joke.
About the only OP items we have for pushing the limit of weapon damage %s are Wand of Woh and Mirror Ball. Wand of Woh with 50% CDR gives you 1333% DPS, but will chew up your AP so you can forget using any other spender at the same time. Mirror Ball with Conflagrate gives you 510% + 165% * <number of hits so far> DPS. So after about 5 hits of Conflagrate you'll be dealing 1333 + 510 + 165*5 = 2668% DPS.
Note: this is mostly talking about solo play.
Arcane/archon wiz with tal rasha, aughilds and vyrs set can play t6 already. Im pretty sure once they fix vyrs set its even better. With tal rasha 3 set, 4 apoc, resouce cost reduction in paragon and not using energy armor you don't need a signature spell. Which means you can use something else like blackhole and still have all your important buffs. We have many ways to buff ourselfs in an arcane torrent build. This is the build you use in groups http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#eNjSfm!RWbg!caaZcc
Frozen armor doesn't affect your arcane pool and the aura around you chills enemies which triggers cold blood for your group members and it gives you the tal rasha meteor. For playing solo you switch cold blood to audacity. You also can switch dominance with blur or even galvanizing wand.
You don't need any attack speed in this build so go for cooldown reduction instead. Perma archon isn't worth it but a cdr of like 45% is enough. Once they fix the vyrs set you will have a archon downtime of only 35sec. Even without stacks archon deals a lot dmg and is your go to spell for elite packs.
You take blackhole supermassive for your lightning meteor proc. You could reroll your weapon dmg to lightning dmg if you have perfect stats otherwise, then you could use spellsteal blackhole for even more dmg.
You stack arcane on your items. So moonlight wand amulet and orpheus wink wand are mandatory.
Its probably easier to just stack fire dmg and find mirrorball and wand of woh, though.
He is not the most charismatic guy but he is the guy who makes this build famous: http://www.twitch.tv/avoidlol/b/520337672
I don't know how fast the clearspeed is in t6 with wand of woh I haven't seen someone using it in t6 yet. But with the right items we can do fine. Other classes are still better sure.
Edit: I should mention that the Templar is the best follower for solo. He heals you and gives you more arcane power per second.
Also on a second thought if you can get a good thunderfury for the lightning proc you could use blackhole with spellsteal for dmg buff. That should also be viable compared to orpheus wink wand.
I haven't noticed Wand of Woh eating up my mana like you're saying, though I only have ~37% CDR. I will say though, the toughness/healing requirement for a wizard using Explosive Blast would be nearly absurd in T6. At 10.5m toughness T5 hurts a fair bit. The kind of gear you would need to both survive and actually kill things at T6 is daunting.
Well with 50% CDR, Explosive Blast drains 20 AP every 3 seconds which is about 6 per second. Given that it's already reasonably hard to channel a lot of other spells, and that Explosive Blast has near zero AP-on-crit potential, it's unlikely you'll be able to sustain both another spender and it.
Unless you have a Cindercoat. But in that case you're better off using Conflagrate + Mirror Ball, which doesn't even use AP in the first place!
I agree that Wizard survivability is a major issue. All of our shield skills have zero scaling (unlike, say, Life per Fury spent - which gets up to 30k life per HotA swing - or Monk's shield skills which both scale on Healthglobes bonus) and half are just silly on high Torments (e.g. Dominance).
I don't understand this. You even acknowledge that MM doesn't use AP, so why does Cindercoat push you into Conflagrate + Mirrorball? Wouldn't it be the other way around?
Explosive Blast only has two elements: Arcane and Fire.
With Arcane you will unlikely be able to cast Explosive Blast every 3 seconds in addition to channeling Disintegrate/Arcane Torrent.
With Fire you could potentially alleviate this by using Cindercoat (which grants you 30% resource cost reduction to both Explosive Blast and whatever Fire Spender you use). However, as Conflagrate with Mirror Ball is the best Fire spell we have, this effectively makes Cindercoat unnecessary. But, as Cindercoat still gives you something like 15% more Fire damage so you might as well keep using it (seriously why did Fire, the highest DPS element, get such an overpowered legendary?).
I suppose I phrased it incorrectly. Cindercoat isn't why you use Conflagrate, it's just a potential way to reduce the cost of Explosive Blast.
I want to disagree with this, but before I do, I need to test it without cindercloak. I am currently running Wand of Woh with 52% CDR and I literally do not see my AP move. I can permanently spam it without issue. I have not focused on my cost reduction of powers, but I do have a cindercloak because of the fire damage. I will test my build tonight without the cindercloak, but I bet my findings will be the same with or without cindercloak.
I will link my profile later when I'm on lunch for people to view, unfortunately I don't have access right now. Maybe someone can link my profile for me? Petro#1780. I have two wizards, the female has the wand of woh and mirrorball focus.
Thanks to corLag for the link
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Petro-1780/hero/46438702
Damn, bro. Woh, +2 Mirrorball, and Cindercloak. Those are definitely the top 3 pieces for the conflag build.
Thanks bud, I luckily got a Woh and spent the last moth farming for the Mirrorball through rifts. Got a cindercloak randomly trying to farm A1 caches (trying to get rift keys and the A1 ring). I would say I got real lucky.
I just tested EB with 53.37% cooldown reduction, 10 AP/sec (no +AP/sec gear, base stat), and 0 AP/spell reduction. I was able to cast EB continuously with worrying about AP, it never dipped below my max AP-20. Here is why:
EB's Cooldown is 2.8 seconds and costs 20 AP.
Base wizard AP regen is 10AP/second.
By the time 2.8 seconds is up, I regenerated 20 AP, and in .2 seconds I would gain another 10.
You could easily add another spender and continuously spam EB. A good spender to use with it would be Black Hole, you would have a 20 AP power to use every ~5 seconds on top of EB, and have no fear of running out of AP. I believe with that setup you would technically be roughly -4 AP at the end of a rotation.