Critical Mass Melee Wizard

[cheerupemokid10]

Loving this build more and more. Parties are pretty happy to see you there and people start waiting on you and following you around like a lost puppy dog. Only major downfall I'm seeing is the huge repair costs I'm running into. With normal wear and tear and no deaths, it's around 20k repairs every ~30-45 min. When I hit a really tough mob the other night and multi-death to broken gear, it was 45k. I was still in the black for profits, but not as much as if I had been sitting back as a ranged spike dps instead of the CC pressure dps. That's what my alts are for though.

[ByShine]

Can't do harm against fire chained mobs
+ Relies on gear

[magicrectangle]

Can't do harm against fire chained mobs

You can't teleport into the middle of them, but fire chains packs are quite easy if they're not shielding. Just walk up to them and lock them down. Standing in a doorway or corner helps, to keep them from circling you, but honestly fire chains are easier to deal with for this build than they are for "traditional" melee classes simply because you can freeze them in place.

[ByShine]

It's hard to get all of them in frost nova and they always spread out in a triangular form to lock you in. Tried this so many times it works if you have gear tho but again what doesn't?

[magicrectangle]

I don't understand. Gear doesn't increase your frost nova radius. If you mean gear to tank the fire chains, I can't stand in it either. One of the packs I fight in the video in the OP is fire chains, jump to 5:05

[ByShine]

Um gear increases damage, ur chance to restore arcane power on crit, which allows spamming easier, also which in turn reqiures crit gear that has res with vit which in turn allows u to perform more efficiently as well as LOH, regen and other crap

if u have bad res, bad crit chance, bad hp u can't do this build
so i dunno what u dont understand about this build not being gear intensive

[magicrectangle]

Gear does all of those things, but your ability to deal with fire chains is about positioning. As long as you have enough crit and ap-on-crit to lock packs down, you're fine. Anything more is great of course but won't fundamentally change your ability to deal with fire chains packs. You could have 10k damage and still do it, it would just take longer.

If you're talking about not having enough crit and ap-on-crit to even perform a lockdown, you shouldn't be doing this build. That's why I said in the guide that you shouldn't even think about doing this build until you have 35% crit and 20 ap-on-crit. These stats aren't hard to hit, if you're willing to drop some char screen damage. Your actual kill speed isn't even going to be that bad if you drop damage, because when packs are locked down you have 100% dps uptime and kill quite quickly.

[iThinman]

Gear does all of those things, but your ability to deal with fire chains is about positioning. As long as you have enough crit and ap-on-crit to lock packs down, you're fine. Anything more is great of course but won't fundamentally change your ability to deal with fire chains packs. You could have 10k damage and still do it, it would just take longer.

If you're talking about not having enough crit and ap-on-crit to even perform a lockdown, you shouldn't be doing this build.

this

That's why I said in the guide that you shouldn't even think about doing this build until you have 35% crit and 20 ap-on-crit....

except this


I'm not doing act3 comfortably yet, so I can't argue with these numbers there, but for act1/2 you can get by with less easily. For act1 I was at 32/7 (7 did indeed make it harder of course) and for act2, I ran mostly with 35/17 and have only recently upgraded to 43.5/17.


Can't stress enough the point about positioning, especially fire chains and molten. Arcane and frozen you just need to GTFO and once you get use to it, you'll be making sure to have twisters still going on a pack so you can sometimes even regen and teleport back in (GTFB) before the pack breaks up.

[iThinman]

Also, keep in mind that with shielding, you'll often need to combine positioning with GTFO/GTFB

[magicrectangle]

Having less AP-on-crit means a longer wind-up to having a secure lockdown (also one of the big problems with star pact build). Once you have a bunch of wicked winds out there, your ap regen is fine even with 10 ap-on-crit, but it takes you longer to get enough wicked winds up. In my opinion, in order to lock a pack down fast enough that it can't do anything nasty to you, 20 ap-on-crit should be the target.

Of course if you have enough defensive stats to tank for a while without a pure lockdown you can get away with less (easy in a1, not so much in a3), although you will still find ranged packs especially annoying as it will be harder to get a lockdown started, leading to them scattering more frequently.