Short ranged wizard build - Abusing cooldown reduction and you der

[Elfik]

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.

I went from confusion to laughter...the link is old and some of the skills are wrong, so of course temporal flux makes no sense in my build. I think that archon used to cost 50 AP, so it made a little bit more sense to not have an AP spender. I also like the build just for the potential of abusing stuns even in single player (making a cycle out of impactful wave->nova->diamond skin). I didn't use prism, I used crystal shell for hopefully a reasonable absorption even in the toughest game areas. I probably would end up picking an AP spender though, in which case, our builds are the same but for the choice of signature skill and AP spender.

[ElementEight]

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).

That's certainly right, but then, one must go to ask themselves if it is better to have more cooldowns so that you get more bang for your crits, or if it is better to have a higher potential to crit by firing more stuff at the bad guys. I'd certainly love to incorporate arcane hydra instead of a generator if Prism makes this possible. Hydra shoost pretty fast from what we've seen, so it's a good idea.

As for critical mass it's very likely normalized. When Blizz has been using the wording "a chance to..." in their WoW games, we're looking at a PPM (proc-per-minute) system. Most on-cast or on-attack stuff (buffs, special attacks or abilities...) use such a system, proccing once or twice per minute to control how often these occur.

If Critical Mass uses such a mechanic, then that explains why some other person saw a 10% proc rate, which was capped by a PPM system rather than just a flat, lowly %.

[Elfik]

So you're saying, the game will "remember" how many procs have occurred in a certain period of time and adjust the proc rate accordingly, possibly even capping the max number of procs per minute?

If critical mass procs only twice per minute, it would be vastly inferior to evocation. It would more likely be something like 10 times per minute, which would be more or less in line with what evocation does. If reflexii got about 100 crits per minute, that would be the case, but then, it seems unlikely that he did. He probably got fewer crits per minute, maybe he got 60? That would mean 6 procs per minute, which isn't terrible, but still significantly inferior to evocation.

[HardRock]

So you're saying, the game will "remember" how many procs have occurred in a certain period of time and adjust the proc rate accordingly, possibly even capping the max number of procs per minute?

This is a common misconception about a PPM system, but it's not true. I blame the name. A PPM system adjusts the proc chance of something based on your weapon speed, but it still remains a chance, not a guarantee.

[ElementEight]

This is a common misconception about a PPM system, but it's not true. I blame the name. A PPM system adjusts the proc chance of something based on your weapon speed, but it still remains a chance, not a guarantee.

Kinda. Still, if something is set to proc once per minute, and you have a 60 sec swing, you'll get 1 proc on that swing. If you have a 30 sec swing, you'll proc once out of two swings. If Critical Mass is set to proc at, say, 10 ppm, then using a 2 hit per sec arcane torrent will see procs occur at an average rate of 1/12 (assuming crits).

[Karpalo]

It would be terrible shame if critical mass or demon hunters night stalker were to be normalized. I kinda doubt it since even in WoW rogues poisons and combat potency were just flat proc rate which meant that you could up the proc chance by increasing attack speed.

There is also another system in place in wow. It's the hidden cooldown one. I could imagine that these passive might have some kind of hidden cooldown present. Like 1 or 2 seconds to prevent absurd proc chains.

[Elfik]

This is a common misconception about a PPM system, but it's not true. I blame the name. A PPM system adjusts the proc chance of something based on your weapon speed, but it still remains a chance, not a guarantee.

Kinda. Still, if something is set to proc once per minute, and you have a 60 sec swing, you'll get 1 proc on that swing. If you have a 30 sec swing, you'll proc once out of two swings. If Critical Mass is set to proc at, say, 10 ppm, then using a 2 hit per sec arcane torrent will see procs occur at an average rate of 1/12 (assuming crits).

Ah ok, I just wasn't sure what elementaleight meant by normalized. Basically, it's just a different unit of measurement, so it's easier to compare and discuss balance with procs per minute than with proc chance per (critical) hit. So normalizing is just converting the proc chance per (# of attacks) into a proc chance per unit time, based on an attack speed (or an attack speed * crit chance), then normalizing for a one minute time span.

Thinking about evocation, 15% of one minute is 9 seconds. Thus, I think critical mass should be balanced around ~9 procs per minute. It seems obvious that most people would not choose only critical mass without also taking the evocation passive. Thus, it should require some specialization of skills and gear to reach that 9 ppm for critical mass, however, given all that effort, critical mass has to be at least comparable to evocation or else it's a waste of a passive slot and you may as well take glass cannon, arcane dynamo, astral presence, or what have you. On second thought, with maximal "effort" critical mass *should* be balanced to outperform evocation, don't you think?

[Karpalo]

Normalization in WoW terms meant that virtual attack speed sweet spot. Applied to both attack power and weapon enchants. Say you would do an instant attack with a sword that's speed was 2.9 seconds, attack power which added 1 dps per 14 units used weapon speed of 2.2 attacks per second with damage calculation. So instead of 2.9 damage attack power only added 2.2 damage to that instant attack. With enchants it meant that 3.0 AS weapon would have double the proc chance that 1.5 weapon would have.

I don't think critical mass is normalized in that sense. If i would have to guess the mechanics involved of that passive skill i would say that it might have hidden cooldown limit which means that it can only proc once per second or something like that and possibly it could have AoE penalties where criticals from AoE abilities would have notably reduced chance to proc the skill.

[Elfik]

Normalization in WoW terms meant that virtual attack speed sweet spot. Applied to both attack power and weapon enchants. Say you would do an instant attack with a sword that's speed was 2.9 seconds, attack power which added 1 dps per 14 units used weapon speed of 2.2 attacks per second with damage calculation. So instead of 2.9 damage attack power only added 2.2 damage to that instant attack. With enchants it meant that 3.0 AS weapon would have double the proc chance that 1.5 weapon would have.

I don't think critical mass is normalized in that sense. If i would have to guess the mechanics involved of that passive skill i would say that it might have hidden cooldown limit which means that it can only proc once per second or something like that and possibly it could have AoE penalties where criticals from AoE abilities would have notably reduced chance to proc the skill.

Well I have never touched or read about WoW so I have no idea what you just said, other than, there are discrete intervals involved and some kind of truncation? I think we can agree that critical mass procs won't work that way. There's no real reason for them to make it complicated like that. I don't even see why they would cap the number of procs per second, given that individual proc chance will be low anyway. Sure, sometimes you'll get lucky and proc a lot of critical mass. It's not game breaking, and probablilities always even out for longer times, when it might be game breaking, such as reducing the cooldown of archon skill.

[syntaxbad]

So here I was, all excited to post the build I'd come up with, only to log on here and find that the same thought had already occurred to you clever kids. Its scary how close my thinking was to the build posted by ElementEight above. Mine differs very slightly:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...eZm!Ugb!aZYZbc

The idea, as above, is to get surrounded, then fire Deep Freeze and Prism in rapid succession, leaving you with a 15% crit bonus, frozen enemies, over 10k of protection, and most importantly, the 15 point reduction in casting costs. The difference is that I would use Death Blossom as the attack while in diamond mode. Why? The massive damage of death blossom is as obvious as its massive downside, non-targetability. However, if you think about how this build plays, you will be running into the middle of packs to activate your combo AND freezing them for a few seconds: ideal circumstances to use a "spray everywhere" skill like death blossom. Furthermore, Temporal Flux just seems to incredibly useful not to use. Even if you haven't slaughtered everything on the screen by the time the freeze wears off, you will be slowing everything in sight by 30%.
Like most people, I see Chain Lightning as the best utility signature to use as a backup. As for Ray of Frost, I picked that to use against hardened targets like bosses, where spewing your death blossom is less than ideal. At first I thought of a varient of disintegrate to take advantage of Temporal Flux. Then I realized that ray of frost has a built in 30% slow AND a rune effect that boosts it to 280% against a single target.
Archon is present because, as noted, Archon is insane. I opted for the increased damage version over the cooldown decrease because I figured that killing your way to an increased duration is more fun than waiting slightly less time between activations. The way I see it, during regular mob-killing play, you follow the Freeze-Skin-Blossom combo path for each mob, chipping away at the Archon cooldown with each crit. You then go on an Archon rampage and make it last as long as you can. Rinse, repeat. Ray of frost helps against single bosses (or maybe is more effective in Archon mode).

Finally, you will notice that the armor skill is gone. Frankly, given that your basic combo involves 1) freezing everything around you, 2) giving yourself a huge damage shield, and 3) quickly killing everything while slowing it with death blossom, I didn't think the extra defense was worth the trade off. As for the 5% crit bonus, having looked through the datamined affix list, it seems like there will be plenty of opportunity to buff your crit chance further with gear. 5% just doesn't seem worth it.

Thoughts?