This is not a specific build to rule them all. It´s not as effective as other popular builds. It´s more of an experiment, a fun attempt to mix things up a bit. More so, it´s an attempt to play Critical Mass Archon without the “required” dps and all res.

My playstyle so far has been a more or less standard melee Critical Mass. I´ve switched teleport for Arcane Destruction and Prismatic Armor for Shocking Aspect to up the damage. This works quite well for me and I farm Act 3 rather effectively. http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...XYT!Wbg!cacacc

Unbuffed stats:
DPS: 43k
Crit Chance: 43 %
All res: 600
Armor: 4k
Life: 23k

When using Arcane Destruction I noticed Archon was quite powerful, even besides the blast, and wanted to find a way to use it some more. I started with a more standard Archon build with Storm Armor – Scramble for DPS and movement speed. And both familiar and Magic Weapon for dps. I killed pretty fast, but not fast enough, my killing speed was too low to be in constant Archon mode. When Archon sometimes was on long cooldown I was unprotected, the only thing in my arsenal being Storm Chaser and Sparkflint. I needed a way to safely and fast get Archon up again. The version I use now, which is surprisingly effective, is this: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...XYO!gZU!ccaacc

Either Familiar or Magic weapon gets switched for Frost Nova. Depending on act and gear Storm Armor gets switched for Prismatic. But more defense means less killing speed means longer cooldown. I have 800 Life on Hit but it feels like 50 with Archon. I´m gonna try some Life Steal and see if that works better. Then maybe I can switch back to Storm Armor for more dps and movement speed.

Basically the playstyle is melt as much as possible in Archon, even with 43k dps its faster than my melee build with Explosive Blast. When Archon is on cooldown lock them down with Nova and get it back up fast with Storm Chaser. This part plays like the melee build. Familiar could be switched for Explosive Blast to do damage during these short periods but then the dps in Archon form takes a huge hit which results in longer cooldown.
The only time this playstyle doesn’t work properly for me is when I have a lone champion left with high HP and have long cooldown on Archon. Then it can take a while before it´s back up. However, he´s frozen most of the time.

As I said, this is not the best build. My gear is simply too bad to play Archon “properly” in act 3. One can argue if its effective to farm Act 3, but it is viable. Especially when coupled with a monk, barb or WD pet to take of some of the heat. Then we burn through elites at least as fast as when I play melee. There are more deaths however.

So, if you want to try something besides Critical Mass melee, don’t want to kite and don’t have 100M to spend on gear for Critical Mass Archon, give this a try. Just don´t complain when you die more than playing perma-freezing melee