The worst place for a wizard. Don't ever go here :)

[Dogbert]

I think i have just found the most horrible place you could ever find yourself in as wizard.
The place i'm talking about is of course the dreaded Cave of the betrayer in act 2 inferno.

This place has it all. Nightmares around every corner. Frustration galore.

1. First we have the poison spitting faces everywhere and anywhere on the walls in the dungeon that are hard to spot and do massive ranged damage. For some reason venom hydra doesn't consider them hostile and therefore won't attack them. Period. So instead of wasting time trying to kill them without my most damaging spell i just try and run past them.

2. The cave worms that pop up from the ground but vanish immediately. If i'm lucky i can hit them once before they disappear and reappear elsewhere. Ahhhhhh this must be the most annoying monster in the game seriously. Did i forget to mention they also do like 25k damage in one hit (If they manage to hit you. Most of the times when i'm busy with something else) I usually have to skip these. It just takes forever to kill them because of the way of their ai. I can almost kill an elite or champion pack in the same time it takes to kill one of these.

3. The real problem however starts when i run into a pack of champions or elite monsters in this nightmare of a dungeon. More often than not it's a pack of those small hyper fast spiderlings of course spawning with the fast speed modifier 90% of the times (like they need it? they are already twice as fast as me lol)

Well that's ok i can just kite them as best as i can. Now this would be possible if this wasn't a cave with the width of approximately two middle aged male wizards making kiting and evading basically impossible.

Fire chains, plague, vortex, molten on any possible teleport destination. And the biggest threat of them all: Mortar...
In this narrow place mortar on those spiderlings is lethal at best.

Now as i do my best to survive i have to battle: 1. the worms and 2. poison spitting faces at the same time. Yay.

Still i am amazed i didn't die more than 6-7 times. Had 98 mythic potions before i went in. 73 left when i came out. That includes picking up every single potion in the cave as well.

I kid you not. this place must be the worst of the worst. I will never come back here when i'm soloing. Zolthon Kulle can keep his rotten cave.

So this is my candidate for the worst place you could ever set foot upon as a wizard. Feel free to agree or disagree.
If anyone got a worse place i'd be interested to know so i can skip it

EDIT: THIS IS MY PICK FOR THE WORST PLACE AS A SOLO WIZARD. SOLO. I FORGOT TO MENTION THAT.

[soloral]

Thanks for the heads up

[magicrectangle]

My first time through the cave of the betrayer was rough too. It is definitely a nasty place if you're a kite-spec... anything. I must have died 50 times in there, although back then repair costs were much lower so it wasn't as big of a deal.

Any tight little dungeon is going to be annoying for a kite-spec wizard, but IMHO you've identified the worst one. It has spiderlings, which are naturally fast, and ghouls, which are naturally fast. Of course luck of the draw could end you up with easy elites anyway, but just in general, tight spaces = bad for kiters.

[Dogbert]

Magic rectangle: When i was there on my own i was using hydra/blizzard with teleport (fracture) and diamond skin (crystal shell)
I had super bad luck also. When i entered the cave i immediately saw a champion pack of spiderlings with shields, fire chains, plague and something else.
Absolutely no room to kite as i was standing at the entrance. Was a hole in the ground up ahead where bats were spawning i used as some sort of obstacle.

I actually went back there today with a random party that was quite good. We did all of act 2 from the sewers to belial like yesterday. Good times. Note to self: Gonna need more hp. He one shot me with 33k hp. You know the party is decent when the melees don't blow up on the first pack encounter. One of the monks kept spamming that implosion skill that pulls everything in the vicinity to him. I seriously love that skill. Wish more monks would use it.
The cave was a breeze with this party.

We ran into an anomaly in the sewers. A unique spectre boss that couldn't be killed. Anyone seen this happen? It was a 0% hp but it wouldn't die. Left it and moved on.

[magicrectangle]

I actually went back there today with a random party that was quite good. We did all of act 2 from the sewers to belial like yesterday. Good times. Note to self: Gonna need more hp. He one shot me with 33k hp.

I highly recommend increasing your EHP by increasing your resists/armor rather than increasing your raw HP. 33k is more than enough. Adding resists/armor will let you take those hits and make all sources of healing and diamond skin more effective.

[Dogbert]

I highly recommend increasing your EHP by increasing your resists/armor rather than increasing your raw HP. 33k is more than enough. Adding resists/armor will let you take those hits and make all sources of healing and diamond skin more effective.

Thank you for the advice but i was in a party with a barbarian and a monk. The barbarian was using warcry and the monk the dodge mantra.
My armour was 6064 which was like 69% damage reduction. When the monk was in town selling stuff my armour went down to 5000 something. Still only like 2% difference in damage reduction. Dimishing returns anyone? Seems like 5000-6000 is the sweet spot for armour. Correct me if i'm wrong.

I didn't check my resistances but with prismatic armour i think they should be fine?

[Karth]

Thank you for the advice but i was in a party with a barbarian and a monk. The barbarian was using warcry and the monk the dodge mantra.
My armour was 6064 which was like 69% damage reduction. When the monk was in town selling stuff my armour went down to 5000 something. Still only like 2% difference in damage reduction. Dimishing returns anyone? Seems like 5000-6000 is the sweet spot for armour. Correct me if i'm wrong.

I didn't check my resistances but with prismatic armour i think they should be fine?

If you do the math, you'll find that armor and res, though they diminish in literal percentage increase, cause a linear increase in effective health. IE the actual returns per point do not diminish.

[wutevaplaya]

Magic rectangle: When i was there on my own i was using hydra/blizzard with teleport (fracture) and diamond skin (crystal shell)
I had super bad luck also. When i entered the cave i immediately saw a champion pack of spiderlings with shields, fire chains, plague and something else.
Absolutely no room to kite as i was standing at the entrance. Was a hole in the ground up ahead where bats were spawning i used as some sort of obstacle.

I actually went back there today with a random party that was quite good. We did all of act 2 from the sewers to belial like yesterday. Good times. Note to self: Gonna need more hp. He one shot me with 33k hp. You know the party is decent when the melees don't blow up on the first pack encounter. One of the monks kept spamming that implosion skill that pulls everything in the vicinity to him. I seriously love that skill. Wish more monks would use it.
The cave was a breeze with this party.

We ran into an anomaly in the sewers. A unique spectre boss that couldn't be killed. Anyone seen this happen? It was a 0% hp but it wouldn't die. Left it and moved on.

Yeah that happened to me once. It was in one of Kulle's dungeons though.

[Kinmaul]

Act 2 in general is a pain in the *** for most classes unless you overgear it. The mobs in a3 hit harder and have more hp, but they are much easier to deal with from a mechanics standpoint (barring a few exceptions of course).

[magicrectangle]

In terms of EHP, there are no diminishing returns on armor and resists.

Prismatic armor gives a %boost to resist all (as does war cry) so "should be fine" is entirely dependent on how much resist all you have from gear/int. Having those buffs without a nice chunk of resist all for them to multiply is pointless.