Critically low cooldowns. And explosions.

[GoldenredDragon]

A wizard build that revolves around abusing the passive

Critical Mass : Your critical hits reduce the cooldown of your spells by 1 second.

So this is what I thought of
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#eZcVim!bfU!aabcca
I expect some critical chance enhancing gear should be available. Hopefully not at the cost of all damage. I suppose a good mix of Precision (higher crit) and Attack (moar damagzors) will be necessary.


Now for the detail. First, the other passives.
Evocation : Reduces all cooldowns by 20%.
Why not ? I mean it shaves off some seconds, and with luck, that will make CD spells get off CD faster.
Blur : Decreases melee damage taken by 25%.
I don't know if it really is any good, but once you see the skills, this one becomes quite obvious.

Electrocute Forked Lightning (Alabaster)
I'm going for criticals in the gear, this goes well with that philosophy.
Frost Nove Deep Freeze (Alabaster)
+30% chance to crit on a well placed frost nova ? Yes please ! :D
Wave Of Force Force Affinity (Golden)
First I like the spell, then while lowering cooldowns thanks to the passive, well that makes for loads of waves of force. Also, it has HUGE AoE, meaning it can trigger quite a number of criticals in crowded places. So I could almost be chain castable, provided the hoards are enough ?
Diamond Skin Crystal Shell (Obsidian)
Not sure about this one. Panic button that comes back on as often as possible ?
Teleport Safe Passage (Obsidian)
Reduce damage after teleporting into a mob, just before frost nova + wave of force, + electrocutes ? Nice ! Lower CD after crits ? Ok, permanent damage reduction !
Archon Arcane Destruction (Alabaster)
Because archon is fun ! Also because this makes a huge explosion (again). And also because the CD goes down quite a bit on crits, if I haven't mentioned it already...

So yeah, that's basically it. I suppose that gear should focus on getting a high crit rate. Something in the lines of 20% would be nice, as it would lead to well-placed frost novas giving 50% crit chance, which with electrocute, pratically means 100%. (double cast speed, and two targets) And with wave of force, and many enemies => guarenteed criticals !

The survivability should be ok, with diamond skin, blur and teleport runed obsidian. Also I gather archon is rather strong. :)

I'm guessing that against single targets, this build won't really shine, as it just becomes an electrocute spammer, with some limited escape abilities and defenses.

Give me your thoughts on this one !

[Pheal]

Hopefully there is some good % crit gears out there cos if you have to rely on precision to scale crits up, you can forget about it lol (scales horribly).

[Elfik]

Nice one.

I would agree with all your choices but add one more:

energy armour (alabaster) "pinpoint barrier"

This armour increases your precision, ie. crit chance, while it's active, ie. all the time.

It's looking like the wizard will have some nice crit procs, whether it's from shocking aspect (storm armour) active skill, or critical mass passive skill, and maybe others when the game is released.

With such procs, it will be possible to have builds that focus entirely on one group of skills and precision, while other builds will not use those rune combinations, and +precision gear will likely have less of an effect on these builds. In order to balance specialty crit proccing builds, precision's effect will have to be scaled down, so it seems like attack will be the favoured offensive stat.

[GoldenredDragon]

So if survivability isn't an issue, one could drop dimond skin to put on the energy armor's pinpoint barrier. I like it. Especially as the malus in arcane power would hardly be noticeable, with gear like "+2 arcane power on critical hit (wizard only)", if they happen to exist. :) And the 20% bonus to defense kinda complements the loss of diamond skin.

Only one part remains unknown : will there be gear that lets this build shine ? (increased crit%)

[Elfik]

I certainly hope there will be increased crit % gear, as crit procs seem to be a mechanic for many classes. There's also increased precision gear which should help with crit % as well. The thing is, will there be nice trade offs in gear so that specialized builds get specialized gear, or will there be gear that just has everything on it? With all the random properties, I expect there will definitely be trade offs, and specialized gear. So you may find higher crit % or +precision on gear, but that same gear may be lacking in defense, resistances, attack, or some other category. I'm hoping that the itemization will be fairly balanced, but I can already tell it's going to be quite interesting.

[ElementEight]

Make sure critting 7 things with a single skill doesn't count as merely 1 second.

Which it probably will, alas.

[TheMythe]

I think collecting these (http://us.battle.net/d3/en/artisan/jeweler/recipe/radiant-star-emerald) might help, unless you socket them into your helmet.

[GoldenredDragon]

Experimenting will certainly be necessary. But indeed, if a wave a force crits 7 times in a single cast, and it only reduces de cooldown by one second, then the whole build can be remodeled differently, and it looses much of its use. In any case, alabastered frost nova would be a must, with the +30% crit chance. :)

I still don't know if the difference between, say 1000 precision and 2000 precision will be a doubling of the crit chance, or if it will be lower. I mean there will certainly be an optimum value. Unless it's purely linear, in which case, more is always better. I highly hope to see +%stat gear, as much as +flat stat is interesting. It would play wonders to have a +5% precision affix stuck to a rune. (if that ever makes it into release)

(Think median XL and it's +%stat gear. It's a bit overboard, but certainly interesting !)

[atigdng]

Make sure critting 7 things with a single skill doesn't count as merely 1 second.

Which it probably will, alas.

Each spell would only be able to proc it once, otherwise it would just be flat out broken.

[GoldenredDragon]

...and flat out uninteresting. :(

[ElementEight]

...and flat out uninteresting. :(

You're right, reducing all cooldowns on a cooldown based class is totally boring.

[GoldenredDragon]

By not much, without really being able to cater towards it, indeed it isn't.

I would much prefer one that takes multi-hitting into account, yet only reduces by say 0.1 seconds, than a single spell, single proc to 1 second. I dunno, maybe I haven't thought it through enough. One thing is for sure :
we'll know once the game is out, just how much it can be interesting ! :)
(like half the rest of this forums topics. a couple months to go. half a year at most. optimism)

[Elfik]

well if it takes mutli-hitting into account, it will have to be balanced to not be OP, and thus not using multi-hitting would simply yield unnoticeable reductions in cooldowns. So you have to focus on rapid-firing aoe spells, likely electrocute, frost nova, and wave of force, not meteor, arcane orb, ray of frost, hydra. It would be an interesting build no doubt, if you could go around eletrocuting things to reduce the cooldown on teleport, and also have nearly chain casting nova/wave of force, but it could easily become either overpowered or underpowered it would seem. Combining it with archon would be interesting as well. In the first few months after release there probably will be overpowered builds so if you're into that I'm guessing this might be one of them.