Short ranged wizard build - Abusing cooldown reduction and you der

[ElementEight]

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...gOm!abg!cYZYbb

Key points:

Rapid damage dealing signature skill and arcane power spender to quickly generate critical hits.
These critical hits reduce all cooldowns.
The reduced cooldowns include Diamond Skin with the Prism rune, which basically makes Disintegrate free, and ensure your survival.
The reduced cooldowns include Slow Time, already on a short cooldown due to its rune and Evocation, which ensure your survival even more. Potential other defensive replacements include Wave of Force, Mirror Images or Frost Nova.
Archon also has its cooldown reduced by crits, its base cooldown already low due to its rune and Evocation. Archon is ****ing badass.
Energy Armor provides armor (you're short ranged, after all) and additonnal arcane power for Archon and the times your Prism isn't up.
Blur provides more damage reduction still.

Some hypothetical numbers:

Disintegrate hits twice per second. With a reasonable 33% chance to crit, you would crit once per 1.5 sec against a single target, basically making the cooldown of your Diamond Skin (base: 15; with evocation: 13) barely longer than its duration, due to Critical Mass. Against two targets or more, you'll potentially be able to keep it up faster than they can break it, especially with Slow Time. Yeah, Slow Time is affected in a similar manner, except that it's got like, 2-3 more seconds of a cooldown.

The rotation:

(without Archon)
You see, like, a champion pack of 4. Make sure that Energy Armor is up.
1) Diamond Skin
2) Slow Time
3) Disintegrate
4) Refresh Diamond Skin & Slow Time as they really quickly come back up, due to your quickly ticking (and critting) Disintegrate via Critical Mass, and of course, Evocation.
5) Running out of AP? Shouldn't really happen, since you have 12 regen per sec, and Disintegrate costs 5 per sec due to Prism, but if that happens, just use the lesser Electrocute.

Enjoy

[Karpalo]

I had similar idea, but if you go the way of critical mass and cooldown reduction i think archon is too good skill to pass up.

[Elfik]

Do archon abilities require AP? I'm asking because I would rather pinpoint barrier than force tap for energy armour, to increase critical hit % by 5%, which will increase damage and increase your critical mass procs.

I agree that disintegrate is probably the best non-signature skill for generating critical hits, assuming it can do so, as the jury seems to be out on that one.

Also, frost nova: deep freeze, is something I'd fit in the build somehow, probably by dropping slow time. I think the freeze effect of frost nova more than offsets the loss of a 30/20 snare from slow time. The perpetuity rune effect I think is far inferior to something like stretch time, which would net you more criticals by the way.

[Jaago]

Why go short-range with Entropy when you can keep your distance and do just as much or more damage with Intensify? I don't think energy tap is really needed with Prism, the effect most likely doesn't last through into Archon, anyways.

I remember someone testing the proc rate of Critical Mass and the result was quite disappointing, like 10% on a critical. If that remains so, I'd consider another passive. There's also some discussion going on about whether skills like Disintegrate can crit at all.

Besides these concerns, I like the build, and will definitely try it myself.

[stillman]

I suspect all builds will be short range builds, like it or not. With so little run speed available and almost no reliable Wizard AoE skills, we will never have much opportunity to hit from a huge distance, exceptions being maybe in the easy Act 1 areas or if you have a party keeping enemies at bay. Also, the defensive skills for slowing, freezing, and stunning enemies work at close range: Frost Nova, Slow Time, Wave of Force, and the armor spells. It's just speculation, but I think we will all have to think in terms of short range like the OP.

[ElementEight]

• Disintegrate can't crit, if I recall. A shame, as it'll certainly ruin the scalling on the skill in comparison to other skills.
• Frost Nova is an alternative I've suggested over Slow Time. It has a slightly shorter cooldown (from 4 to 7 seconds shorter with the rune), but it also has less than half the duration. The jury needs to play the game to figure that one out.
• If Prism can be kept up for a good amount of time, the extra AP on Energy Armor may indeed seem lackluster.
• I highly doubt the proc % chance on critical mass would be a measly 10% per crit.

As a result of these, I have switched the build around: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...YOm!abg!aaZYZb

The choice of Disruption on Arcane Torrent (to replace the non-critting Disintegrate) is that it makes the skill the most damaging and reliable rune. It will also benefit Archon for its first 6 seconds if you use AT then timely use your Archon skill against affected foes.

As Arcane Torrent is not a melee alternative, Electrocute was also changed to Chain Lightning, a ranged version of the skill which hits up to 6 targets, hopefully racking up quick critical strikes.

In a non-solo environment, Blur could be changed to Glass Cannon or Arcane Dynamo. The latter, as Electrocute can gather up flashes of insight pretty quickly, and since Arcane Torrent is a channeled skill, it would be able to benefit from the bonus for an entire AP bulb, which is by far superior to non channeled skills.

[Karpalo]

Do archon abilities require AP? I'm asking because I would rather pinpoint barrier than force tap for energy armour, to increase critical hit % by 5%, which will increase damage and increase your critical mass procs.

I agree that disintegrate is probably the best non-signature skill for generating critical hits, assuming it can do so, as the jury seems to be out on that one.

Also, frost nova: deep freeze, is something I'd fit in the build somehow, probably by dropping slow time. I think the freeze effect of frost nova more than offsets the loss of a 30/20 snare from slow time. The perpetuity rune effect I think is far inferior to something like stretch time, which would net you more criticals by the way.

I think combination of arcane hydra and arcane torrent is better than disintegrate as long you are not hitting absurd amount of targets with the beam (assuming it even can crit). Hydra and torrent share pretty good synergy with each other.

My take on wizard build would be this: http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...ROm!bYg!ZaZaZb

Glass cannon is kinda questionable passive perk (depends how it's calculated), but it could be replaced with something totally different like 20% reduced physical damage. Equipping shield in the offhand and using archon would make that wizard absurdly tanky.

Interesting point to make is that critical mass has that 1 second written on green. I'm under assumption that it means that could perhaps somehow be affected and maybe increased to like 2 seconds shaved off per proc. Maybe it's level tied or something?

[Elfik]

Yeah I know reflexii tested critical mass in, I think patch 12; here is the thread: http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/s...analysis/page2

So he found only about 10% of critical hits procced a cooldown reduction from critical mass. This may seem low but since every hit on every target can potentially proc a critical mass cooldown reduction (cmcr?), fast attacks and area attacks will still have decent amounts of procs. Thus, I believe either electrocute: chain lightning or spectral blade: thrown blades (spectral blade is actually 3 attacks at 35% weapon damage) to be the best signature skills for critical hits. Maybe shock pulse with the explosions will be decent.

Also, I would probably prefer the long range versions of disintegrate, since disintegrate has pierce, may as well use that (not many wizard skills have it). I like convergence for the wider beam. Still, I would have to try all the skills before deciding.

As for the arcane hydra thing, I think it's a nice build, but in terms of maximizing the effects of the critical mass passive, it's not optimal. But the build itself might be better, if critical mass or frost nova or some other factor turns out to be weaker than assumed. Personally, my favorite archon build is still the one I posted in the archon thread (see link above). I use wave of force, frost nova, and diamond skin to maximize my return on the passives evocation, and critical mass.

[ElementEight]

Yeah I know reflexii tested critical mass in, I think patch 12; here is the thread: http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/s...analysis/page2

So he found only about 10% of critical hits procced a cooldown reduction from critical mass. This may seem low but since every hit on every target can potentially proc a critical mass cooldown reduction (cmcr?), fast attacks and area attacks will still have decent amounts of procs. Thus, I believe either electrocute: chain lightning or spectral blade: thrown blades (spectral blade is actually 3 attacks at 35% weapon damage) to be the best signature skills for critical hits. Maybe shock pulse with the explosions will be decent.

Also, I would probably prefer the long range versions of disintegrate, since disintegrate has pierce, may as well use that (not many wizard skills have it). I like convergence for the wider beam. Still, I would have to try all the skills before deciding.

As for the arcane hydra thing, I think it's a nice build, but in terms of maximizing the effects of the critical mass passive, it's not optimal. But the build itself might be better, if critical mass or frost nova or some other factor turns out to be weaker than assumed. Personally, my favorite archon build is still the one I posted in the archon thread (see link above). I use wave of force, frost nova, and diamond skin to maximize my return on the passives evocation, and critical mass.

I've found all of these thoughts to be correct. If you look 2 posts above, I've modified the initial build to take these ideas into account.

Our builds are really similar, but I think you're really missing out on not having an actual AP spender that isn't dictated by a long cooldown, especially since the entire point of Prism is being able to spam Arcane Torrent/Disruption, one of the highest DPS skill in the game, basically for free.

I'm still debating Blur. While the build has the advantage of having basically the lowest CC and defensive tool cooldown ever, you'll probably still be tanking a few hits. The 30% redux on Temp. Flux doesn't seem all that big. Glass Cannon, perhaps, if tanking ends up being a non-issue due to skin/nova's cd's?

In fact, I'm not even sure why your build has it since your only sources of arcane damage come from Archon.

[Karpalo]

Hydra is fire and forget. I think it would have fairly good synergy with critical mass. Question is how many times it will hit over the duration it is active. As a bonus arcane torrents disruption boosts arcane hydras damage. Another option i see viable could be using blizzard with cold blooded in the place of hydra. Still i think on average combination of hydra and arcane torrent will give you the most projectiles per second, which in turn translates to max amount of critical mass procs (if it's not normalized somehow).