New wizard PvP thread

[snurrfint]

This is the exaggeration I was talking about.

I am merely highlighting the gaping holes in your build concept. After all, do you want sycophants or actual pitfalls to consider?

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...Udg!bdW!Zabaab

Here, a fairly bog-standard WD DoT based build that your Wizard can't really do anything about. Your damage blocking abilities (probably) don't work affect the DoTs, and since this WD is geared for offense, he should be able to overcome your regeneration stack readily. And heaven help you if Blizzard ends up implementing a "stop natural life regeneration" as an item mod for poison damage crits or the like.

Barbarian has access to Rend/Whirlwind/Earthquake and the fact, that, well, it is a Barbarian that has a ludicrous amount of tanking/stunning/melee DPS of its own. Beating Barbarians when your build is basically guaranteed to let them build up their momentum is probably going to be hard.

Monks... depends on the build I guess. They have plenty sources of DoT damage and impressive healing of their own.

Demon Hunter will probably have the most trouble killing you if the Impale and Strafe or Rapid Fire with Shadow Power combo can't immediately end you, but you will probably not kill a standard DH escape kit either with such weak and melee reliant offense.

Other Wizards? Blizzard, Hydra, Twister, Disintegrate, Ray of Frost...


Look at it this way - you have a clever twist on a life leach build that took a specific skill combination to deal with one of leach build's greatest conceptual enemies - overwhelming burst damage. But you have no way to glue yourself to a target and no way to handle being disabled with two of your major defensive abilities being reliant on not being stunned, etc. Your ability to block burst damage isn't water tight - Familiar, from the description, will be bypassed by anything that can deal its burst damage in 3 rapid spikes.

That last part about familiar and 3 rapid strikes we don't know anything about, and I presume you mean 4 rapid strikes. 3 attacks will only get the wizard down to 22% health, and the fourth will then be blocked by the familiar.

Well, yes. A pure dot witch doctor build might be to much for this build. It's a matter of how the dmg is calculated and what "incoming attack" means for the energy armor rune effect. If one cast of locust swarm is considered to be "one incoming attack" the dmg of the locust swarm will be reduced to 80 dmg over 3 seconds. Oh no! If however every tick counts as an attack or the dmg is continuous, then you might have trouble with more than one Dot-dmg at once.

If poison dmg will prevent character healing/regen this build is pretty screwed but we have yet to see such an effect.

I don't know how either monks or barbs will be able to perform more than 5 attacks per second but I guess it's possible.

I don't see the problem with gluing yourself to a target. With frost nova and free teleport for 1.5 seconds every time you get hit you should be in a good place. Not optimal but pretty good. And we don't know if you will be able to do enough dmg or not. But if you are very hard to kill, even mediocre dmg will be a pain in the ***. Simple spells like poison dart are proven to be very effective in the arena, so why shouldn't spectral blades do the trick?

[HardRock]

Well, on the skill front this build is based on Force Armor and Galvanizing Ward, everything else is optional, so there's quite a bit of room left to customize your setup. The greatest drawback of this concept is that it requires highly specialized Rare gear, which won't be easily acquired. Realistically, I don't expect to see this build used to its full potential in the first few months after the release of the game.

As for its offensive capabilities, I think many people would underestimate it. Rare gear has a maximum of 6 affix slots I think and only 1 or 2 of them are crucial to the effective use of Force Armor. The other slots can spawn with Attack, Precision or any kind of offensive stats. Yes, your damage will be lower compared to other builds, because your enchant and gem slots are also taken, but I think it won't be terrible.

Your damage blocking abilities (probably) don't work on the DoTs

If DoTs completely negate our regen, then this is indeed a really big problem. I'm hoping that they won't work that way and that DoTs will have to overcome our HP regen to do damage.

Monks... depends on the build I guess. They have plenty sources of DoT damage and impressive healing of their own.

Their Way of the Hundred Fists would absolutely demolish this build, especially if the Monk increases the number of attacks in its second stage with Hands of Lightning. This skill is probably more dangerous than Rapid Fire. I can't say for sure, because I don't know how much damage it does per hit in its second stage.

Familiar, from the description, will be bypassed by anything that can deal its burst damage in 3 rapid spikes.

Yep, the greatest weakness of the Familiar's damage absorbtion is that it can be overcome easily with fast attacks, like Rapid Fire and the second stage of Way of the Hundred Fists. Since Force Armor has problems against the same skills, Familiar's Ancient Guardian effect is not the best defensive option for this build.

Hopefully it will be effective against DoTs at least, because those effects do their damage in 1 ticks per second. In this case, a level 4 Ancient Guardian would protect you for 5 seconds against one DoT.

With this build, I would rather rely on offensive CCs like Frost Nova for defense and try to make myself scarce when rapid damage is coming my way.

If one cast of locust swarm is considered to be "one incoming attack" the dmg of the locust swarm will be reduced to 80 dmg over 3 seconds. Oh no! If however every tick counts as an attack or the dmg is continuous, then you might have trouble with more than one Dot-dmg at once.

It's almost guaranteed to be the latter.

free teleport for 1.5 seconds every time you get hit you should be in a good place

I completely forgot, that if you combine the Illusionist passive with this build, your Teleport cooldown will most likely reset at every damage you receive. That's simply amazing. If this build could be made to work reliably in PvE as well, then it could become the king of MF builds. Dealing with hordes of monsters will be pretty tricky though.

[konfeta]

That last part about familiar and 3 rapid strikes we don't know anything about, and I presume you mean 4 rapid strikes. 3 attacks will only get the wizard down to 22% health, and the fourth will then be blocked by the familiar.

Energy Armor's threshold is 38%, no? Two hits drop you to 24%. Account for even minimal life regen and it puts you above the 25% threshold for Familiar. Third hit kills. Or am I missing something?

I don't know how either monks or barbs will be able to perform more than 5 attacks per second but I guess it's possible.

Why is 5 attacks per second a requirement? Stick on a DoT to curb natural regeneration, stun (or maybe even just dodge if monk) to disable the life leach, and kill.

I don't see the problem with gluing yourself to a target. With frost nova and free teleport for 1.5 seconds every time you get hit you should be in a good place. Not optimal but pretty good. And we don't know if you will be able to do enough dmg or not. But if you are very hard to kill, even mediocre dmg will be a pain in the ***. Simple spells like poison dart are proven to be very effective in the arena, so why shouldn't spectral blades do the trick?

Well, true, it's not *bad* at chasing targets, but it requires you be constantly under attack to chase successfully and you only have a single freeze effect for your CC.

Those simple spells were runed for damage. You runed for leach. And I think there is a difference between mediocre damage and almost minimal damage choice.

If DoTs completely negate our regen, then this is indeed a really big problem. I'm hoping that they won't work that way and that DoTs will have to overcome our HP regen to do damage.

Doubt regen would be flat out negated as simply as that, but I can see a variety of heal reduction effects popping up. They were present in WoW, at least.

Hopefully it will be effective against DoTs at least, because those effects do their damage in 1 ticks per second. In this case, a level 4 Ancient Guardian would protect you for 5 seconds against one DoT.

You sure? DoTs in this game seem to do their damage over a very large number of ticks per second.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6ZFMi1nS4A

[snurrfint]

I completely forgot, that if you combine the Illusionist passive with this build, your Teleport cooldown will most likely reset at every damage you receive. That's simply amazing. If this build could be made to work reliably in PvE as well, then it could become the king of MF builds. Dealing with hordes of monsters will be pretty tricky though.

Yep, I thought about that too. I don't know. How likely is it to be hit 5 times within a second in pvm? Hard to say.

But in pvp it should be very effective. If you are not stunned you should be able to teleport away instantly when rapid dmg is coming up.

I think it is to many uncertain factors right now to say anything about this build. But it will be fun to experiment around.

The good think with d3 is that you can swap out your build at any time. So experimentation like this will be extremely easy.

[Jaago]

Well, on the skill front this build is based on Force Armor and Galvanizing Ward, everything else is optional, so there's quite a bit of room left to customize your setup. The greatest drawback of this concept is that it requires highly specialized Rare gear, which won't be easily acquired. Realistically, I don't expect to see this build used to its full potential in the first few months after the release of the game.

I wouldn't do this build without Teleport and Illusionist, either, or at the very least it would be an another build, methinks. At least one other defensive options seems like a must as well. That leaves three active and one passive for true customisation.

Yep, the greatest weakness of the Familiar's damage absorbtion is that it can be overcome easily with fast attacks, like Rapid Fire and the second stage of Way of the Hundred Fists. Since Force Armor has problems against the same skills, Familiar's Ancient Guardian effect is not the best defensive option for this build.

I can't figure out what part of the rune tooltip says that it can't absorb quick successive hits. It doesn't say it can, either, so I guess we don't really know. But if it can, 5-8 absorbs are well enough against Rapid Fire and such to let you teleport away to safety.

On a side note, if its damage absorption would be applied after Force Armor, Diamond Skin would be a beast of a defensive skill for the build. That sounds way too optimistic to my ears, though.


Overall, I think this build would prefer to avoid contact with the opponent because the regen will not reach like half of max HP per second or something until with the very best gear. Taking into account that even a hit every couple of seconds is dangerous, an attritionist build seems to me like the way to go.

[konfeta]

What's going to be the most humorous aspect is hunting down godlike gear that doesn't have vitality on it.

[HardRock]

Energy Armor's threshold is 38%, no?

At level 4, it is. At level 7 it was 26% before the calculator was updated. I used 26% in my calculations.

Doubt regen would be flat out negated as simply as that, but I can see a variety of heal reduction effects popping up. They were present in WoW, at least.

I believe poison criticals had an effect like that in the past, but critical effects are not in the beta at the moment, so who knows if we'll see a heal reduction effect in the future or not. We haven't heard anything about this as far as I know.

You sure? DoTs in this game seem to do their damage over a very large number of ticks per second.

Seems like about a tick per every half a second to me, based on the numbers that pop up. This makes DoTs much more dangerous for this build than I expected them to be.

I wouldn't do this build without Teleport and Illusionist, either, or at the very least it would be an another build, methinks. At least one other defensive options seems like a must as well. That leaves three active and one passive for true customisation.

The build's core defensive synergy requires only one active and passive skill, the rest is up to the players. If someone wants to play it like a glass cannon, they can. However, I wouldn't play it without one additional defensive skill either.

I can't figure out what part of the rune tooltip says that it can't absorb quick successive hits.

It can, that's not an issue. The problem is, that it's not really effective against that type of attacks. At level 4, it can absorb both 5*50k Meteor hits in 10 seconds (made up numbers) or 5*100 Rapid Fire hits in less than a second. Your Familiar would die either way.

In my previous post I should've said, that it can be overcome quickly, not easily.

5-8 absorbs are well enough against Rapid Fire and such to let you teleport away to safety.

If you see it coming, then I concur. The High Heavens help you however, if a smart DH decides to jump you from invisibility.

On a side note, if its damage absorption would be applied after Force Armor, Diamond Skin would be a beast of a defensive skill for the build. That sounds way too optimistic to my ears, though.

That sounds too good to be true. Diamond Skin would become 5+ seconds of invulnerability in certain scenarios.

Overall, I think this build would prefer to avoid contact with the opponent because the regen will not reach like half of max HP per second or something until with the very best gear. Taking into account that even a hit every couple of seconds is dangerous, an attritionist build seems to me like the way to go.

Yep, avoiding damage at all cost should be this build's first priority against multiple targets. In 1v1 it can take damage really well, even periodic hits every few seconds shouldn't be a problem, when you regenerate to full life in just 1.1 second (less, if you drink a resilience elixir).

What's going to be the most humorous aspect is hunting down godlike gear that doesn't have vitality on it.

If Vitality will be really valuable in general, then this could mean that you will be able to gear up your character from the scrapyards of the AH. Hopefully people won't develop a salvage reflex for these items.

[talukita]

The one thing that makes me consider is Familiar with Ancient Guardian. Again it doesn't have any CD, so you can resummon it as many times as you want after it has absorbed all the attacks. I'm not thinking about being immortal, but it still absorbs loads of dmg and especially useful against bursting skills like Meteors.

Anyway, this is my 2 PvP builds:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...iQc!Vaf!ZZZcYa

This is my burst build, look at the set it's easy to guess that I will use a 2hand weapon to maximize the dmg. Due to Bone Chill and Time Warp only gives dmg boost in a short amount of time only a burst build would make full use of it, (Familiar with Crimson or Glass Canon would be better for DOT/normal build because they are more consistent), and Meteor is the way to go. Teleport + Obsidian + Energy Armor and Blur gives you plenty def to survive more to wait for the CD. And Wave of Force is there to chain Meteors more easily.

Gears would skip out entirely cast speed and on hit effect but focus on dmg, def and + max AP. With Energy Tap (max +40) and several + max AP you should be able to drop like 3-4 Meteors in a row (while you drop Meteors you will also regen some AP), which will nearly ensure to kill anyone I think.

The reason I build burst is because other classes like Monk and WD has many skills to heal so it's quite annoying to extend the battle. You may have some problems against Wiz that has Ancient Guardian/ Force Armor like the one that snurrfint build but the DOT of Meteors may take care of that. The only problems I see of this build is that it's quite boring to run around to wait for AP regen and CD after you have finished your combo or if you miss or fail your combo, YOU.ARE.****ED!!!

Second build:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...hOQ!YWe!YcaZZa
Vice versa with the first build, this build will kit as much as possible to troll the enemies and make them rage. Using Hydras you can hit enemies without even seeing them (lightning hydras never miss), so you can attack while still staying far away from the enemies. Ray of Frost with Obsidian snare 50% for a freaking long time, makes it's even harder for they to approach you. Teleport + Wormhole + Illusionist give even more zoning ability, and Mirror Images is there to add the rages (I feel that other runes are quite useless except for Alabaster because if your images don't deal dmg they will find out you instantly).

For gears, since Hydras hit A LOT, you should utilize on-hit effect opts. Like AP per crit. That's also why I use Energy Armor with Alabaster, to add more chance to crit = more AP. If you feel that you can generate enough AP you can switch into Energy Tap to chain more Hydras.

Problem of this build? You are screwed if you meet some one who can heal, they will thank you a lot for giving them plenty time to do so.

Also these builds are also how I use weapons, 2hand is for burst and 1hand is for DOT.

[HardRock]

I like your second build, but I'm not sure that relying on AP on crit for much needed resource regen (thanks to Hydra and Ray of Frost) is a good idea in PvP for a Wizard. It would probably require too big of an investment into Precision for it to work, at the expense of Attack and/or defensive stats. Even then, it's unreliable.

With the Hydra + Mirror Image combo you can already safely harass enemies from behind obstacles, but I would further improve upon that, by dropping Ray of Frost for Magic Missile with the Seeker effect. AP management can then be handled by the Prodigy passive much more reliably, in place of Galvanizing Ward.

Relying on channeled skills like Ray of Frost outside of 1v1 PvP doesn't seem like a good idea to me anyway. You can do good damage and slow one enemy down, but you're standing in place, completely open to attacks. I don't like it. There's a reason why Mages didn't use Arcane Missiles constantly in WoW PvP, despite it's good damage. Ray of Frost has the same weaknesses.

I would also consider swapping Energy Armor's Pinpoint Barrier effect for Energy Tap. That would allow you to open fights more strongly by casting two Hydras at max AP.

With the Illusionist passive I would rather use Safe Passage in Teleport in PvP. Even without the passive, if you use Teleport on every cooldown, you will have a bonus 25% damage reduction for 62.5% of the fight. You can potentially keep up that buff indefinitely if Illusionist kicks in regularly, in which case you would probably need the buff more than the multiple Teleports. Now that I think about it, this would be amazing for the Force Armor build we discussed before.

If you miss the slowing effect of Ray of Frost, then you can compensate for that somewhat by swapping Prodigy for Temporal Flux and shifting your AP regen to Energy Armor with its Absoption effect.

All in all, this is the revised build I would go with: http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...hOQ!YWc!YacZZY

[talukita]

I like your second build, but I'm not sure that relying on AP on crit for much needed resource regen (thanks to Hydra and Ray of Frost) is a good idea in PvP for a Wizard. It would probably require too big of an investment into Precision for it to work, at the expense of Attack and/or defensive stats. Even then, it's unreliable.

Well, not really. Increasing crit chance is also a form of increasing dmg, not to mention that you can get +% crit dmg.

More over, I don't think that getting AP on crit is that hard, on some gears I see that you can get about 7-8 AP/crit, so with 3 gears you will have around 25 AP per crit (there are a lot of random properties). A Hydra seems to fire 3 hits per sec, so if you have about 30% crit chance it will restore you averagely 30 AP/s, combine with innate regen you will have about 45 AP/s. This means that you can even spam Hydras if you have enough gears without signature skills, awesome right?

With the Hydra + Mirror Image combo you can already safely harass enemies from behind obstacles, but I would further improve upon that, by dropping Ray of Frost for Magic Missile with the Seeker effect. AP management can then be handled by the Prodigy passive much more reliably, in place of Galvanizing Ward.

Well I too have thought about Seeker, I guess it's a good replacement, I would even swap out some skills if the slow is stacked with Ray of Frost, 74% slow is just sick!!!!

And I think that Prodigy is quite unnecessary end game, Galvanizing Ward is there to help you generate more Illusionist and extend the battle longer.

Relying on channeled skills like Ray of Frost outside of 1v1 PvP doesn't seem like a good idea to me anyway. You can do good damage and slow one enemy down, but you're standing in place, completely open to attacks. I don't like it. There's a reason why Mages didn't use Arcane Missiles constantly in WoW PvP, despite it's good damage. Ray of Frost has the same weaknesses.

I think you should check back the description of RoF, it states that RoF chilling effect lasts for freaking 7s, which means you can just blast them and they are chilled for the next 7s. That's why I use RoF like a debuff skill rather than a damaging skill.

I would also consider swapping Energy Armor's Pinpoint Barrier effect for Energy Tap. That would allow you to open fights more strongly by casting two Hydras at max AP.

I have already mentioned that if you feel that you already have enough crit chance you could swap it with Energy Tap.

With the Illusionist passive I would rather use Safe Passage in Teleport in PvP. Even without the passive, if you use Teleport on every cooldown, you will have a bonus 25% damage reduction for 62.5% of the fight. You can potentially keep up that buff indefinitely if Illusionist kicks in regularly, in which case you would probably need the buff more than the multiple Teleports. Now that I think about it, this would be amazing for the Force Armor build we discussed before.

Well because I think the point of this build is not getting hit, and Teleport with Safe Passage doesn't receive much benefit from Illusionists since, you know, at lvl 7 rune it allows 16s %DR, which equals permanently DR, so casting more doesn't help anything. Fracture seems to get the most benefits here, but I'm not quite sure that the images created from it receiv synergies from the runes or not.

So.... how about this?
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...OQj!YWe!aaYZYc