Build proposed by AlexBroPA

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Preface

I've played my wizard as a solo player, and have cleared all of Inferno. This is the build I've used throughout all of Hell and Inferno (save for Azmodan and Diablo boss fights), and it's used by a number of other very successful players as well. When played correctly, it is one of the easiest builds to gear for (as it uses all standard stats, no gimmicks), and is likely to be your best shot of getting The Butcher (Act I) on farm when you're just starting out inferno.

As a wizard, you need three things in order to survive in Inferno:

Heavy damage output. The ability to take a few hits and regenerate health rapidly. Mobility.

This build accounts for all three of those factors, which we'll discuss in more detail later on.

The Build

Active Skills

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Shock Pulse - Piercing Orb

Depending on the situation, this is either going to be the majority of your damage (such as when standing back and nuking a grouped pack of slow monsters), or it is going to be very sparingly used (such as when kiting an elite pack of extra fast monsters). The point of this is, only use shock pulse when you aren't taking damage. It's a bonus, it's not your mainstay damage dealer.

Teleport - Fracture

This right here is one of the most glorious combinations in this build. We'll discuss the use of it later, but just understand that it's a combination of Teleport and Mirror Image, which is incredibly useful for effectively any situation. When you teleport, you create two mirror images at the location where you land, which significantly cuts the amount of attention your own character receives. Either teleport far away in order to put some distance between a group that's too powerful for you, or teleport a few inches away, in order to create two mirror images that will keep the monsters standing in place for a short bit, long enough for an extra few acid stacks from Venom Hydra.

Hydra - Venom Hydra

At first, I thought Venom Hydra was going to suck, but in reality it is absolutely incredible. You have to understand how it works: Venom Hydra spits out acid attacks, which hit enemies and do damage, however those acid attacks also drop a stacking AoE DoT at the enemy's feet, which stacks up to (I believe) ten times. That means, if your hydra attacks for 2k damage, and you manage to keep an enemy standing relatively still, there is very rapidly going to form a pool of venom underneath him that ticks for 20,000 damage. That is a hell of a lot of damage.

The trick with Venom Hydra is to try keep your enemies grouped around it. The more time they spend standing on acid pools, the more damage they're going to take, and the more the Venom Hydra is going to replenish those acid pools (because it will be attacking the enemies standing right on top of them). In certain fights, Venom Hydra can account for the vast, vast majority of your damage output.

Energy Armor - Force Armor

Even after being nerfed, this ability is absolutely quintessential for Inferno Play as a wizard. As long as you are geared appropriately for the difficulty, it will ensure that every time an enemy hits you, instead of hitting you for 80-100% of your life, it only does 35% of your life. This allows you to take a hit or two before you teleport away or use Diamond Skin. It gives you room to breathe.

Blizzard - Snowbound

Blizzard is another spell that I thought was going to be useless when I was leveling, but it turns out it is absolutely fantastic. With Snowbound (decreasing its casting cost to 20 AP), you can drop blizzards everywhere, and they provide a constant snare to your enemies that ranges from mildly effective to unequivocally necessary. Dropping a blizzard on your enemies and another one between them and yourself gives you time to blast away at them with your Shock Pulse, and it helps your Venom Hydra build large acid stacks underneath them.

Diamond Skin - Crystal Shell

Another highly important defensive skill, which can either be used defensively (oh shit there's guys all over me, pop DS so I can survive and teleport out), or offensively (standing your ground while an enemy pummels away at you, teleporting and creating two new mirror images every time he lands a hit on the real you, all the while your Venom Hydra is tearing him apart with a fully stacked acid pool). With Energy Armor on, you can take anywhere between 3 and 5 hits in Diamond Skin without taking a single point of damage. And even though you don't take damage, taking a hit still procs Illusionist (see later), so you can get a number of free teleport / mirror images out of it.

Passive Skills

Blur

Not much to be said about this one. It's absolutely necessary in Inferno, and helps a lot in Hell. The only time you would want to swap it out is if you're being hit for less than 15% of your life, which would fail to proc Illusionist. I was once going up against an elite pack in Inferno Act 1 that were hitting me for 3k each (with my life at 25000). I wasn't able to get any refreshes on my teleport whenever they caught up to me, and they mowed me down in seconds. When I respawned, I took off blur, and they started hitting me for 4k each, which allowed me to teleport every single time they touched me. The rest of the fight was easy as cake.

However, that's an advanced and very rare situation. For the most part, Blur is necessary.

Illusionist

Enough cannot be said about the value of this skill. In Inferno, there will essentially never be a damaging attack that does less than 15% of your life in damage, which means that with this passive skill, every time you take damage, the cooldown for Teleport is refreshed. The value this talent has for kiting cannot be overstated.

Galvanizing Ward

One of the stats that I'm going to talk about down below is life regeneration. This is incredibly important, because you're going to get hit, and it's going to take out 35% of your life, and you need to be able to regenerate that life while kiting and distracting inferno mobs. Thus, life regen is considered an extremely important stat for wizards to have. The better you are at avoiding damage, the less of it you need, but starting out, the 310 HP/s provided by Galvanizing Ward is incredibly valuable. Later on, when your gear improves significantly and you no longer need that buff, you can switch to Glass Cannon or something else that suits your flavor. For now, stick with Galvanizing Ward.

The Gear / Stats

Here we're going to break down how you should try to balance and budget your items, as well as what you should be focusing on at various stages of play in Hell and Inferno

Defensive Stats

This is a simple formula to decide how to balance your defensive stats earlier on in the game:

Take your life and divide it by 35. Subtract 310 from that number. That's how much "All Resist" you should have. Multiply that number by 10, that's how much "Armor" you should have.



As an example:

Say I have 23,000 life, 400 all resist, and 3500 armor. By the calculator, I have (23000/35 - 310 =) 52 points too many of all resist, relative to my life. What that means is, the stat allocation of the items I wear are too heavily budgeted towards all resist, and I'd get more benefit to my EHP (effective HP) by changing my gear up so that I lower my "All Resist" some and increase my vitality. If I swapped out items to increase my life from 23,000 to 24,000, and in the process decreased my all resist from 400 to 375, my EHP would increase, despite the fact that the budget of stats among my items wouldn't have changed at all.

The reason for this is that there are diminishing returns in armor and resist, where the first 100 all resist (or the first 1000 armor) may decrease the damage you take by X%, the second 100 all resist will only decrease your incoming damage by a fraction of that amount. Similarly, your health pool's effect on EHP scales with damage reduction, so an increase in your healthpool of X amount increases your EHP more if you have more damage reduction in place, than if you had less damage reduction.

Keep in mind that 10 points of intelligence add 1 point of resist all to your character, so if you're looking at an item with 35 resist all / 0 int versus one with 25 resist all / 100 int, the second item really has 35 resist all once you put it on.

For dexterity, you want to get 100, and don't actively try to get any more than that. Dex suffers significant diminishing returns for dodge after 100 points, but the first 100 points are quite valuable.

Offensive stats

You will find in high levels that "Attack Speed Increase" (I call it IAS, for increased attack speed, the term used in Diablo 2), increases your character sheet DPS significantly. This can be a bit misleading, because the bonus to DPS provided by IAS only occurs if you're attacking 100% of the time. As a wizard, you're going to be doing a lot of running around and summoning hydras and blizzards - not frequently are you going to be able to stand your ground and just unleash hell on a group of monsters. Because of this, even though stacking IAS may pump up your DPS on your character sheet, it is going to decrease your real DPS if you gimp your other stats because of it.

As a general rule of thumb, you should aim for ~30% IAS with a 1H weapon setup, or ~45-60% IAS with a slow 2H weapon setup. The higher IAS is necessary for a 2H weapon setup, because you need to be able to drop blizzards and hydras in rapid enough succession to continue kiting with certain packs, and that's not possible with a 0.9 attacks/second weapon without a higher dose of IAS.

You're probably going to be starting out with a 1H weapon setup initially, and in order to get that IAS cheaply, I recommend checking the AH for a pair of rings with 15% IAS and 65+ Int. They shouldn't cost more than around 10-15k gold each.

Gear specifics

Weapon

For act 1 inferno, and as you're learning to play this build, I'd suggest you get a 1h weapon (try to maximize DPS, I completed act 1 inferno with a ~700 dps 1h wand) and a wizard source (ideally with high +damage and a secondary stat, like int or vitality.). This will allow you all the casting time in the world to drop blizzards and teleport out of the way - it will allow you to react more quickly when you make a mistake and are about to die, and for someone relatively new to the build, to the difficulty, and without fantastic gear, being nimble is much more valuable than hitting a bit harder.

By the time you get into act 2 inferno, you should be comfortable enough that you can graduate to a ~1200 dps 2h weapon. Such a weapon will cause your blizzard and hydra spells to hit significantly harder, but it will require you to be able to proactively defend yourself from enemies. If you're prone to getting caught in bad situations where you need to port the hell out and drop a trail of blizzards behind you to widen the gap a bit, be hesitant about switching to a 2H weapon. If you do, pick up an amulet and/or a pair of gloves with IAS, in order to bring you up to the 45-60% range discussed earlier.

Movement Speed

12% runspeed on your boots is an absolute must. The difference between 10% and 12% is simply massive when it comes to kiting enemies. Don't settle for anything less.

Life Regeneration

You should aim for higher than 600-700 health per second. 310 of that can come from Galvanizing Ward, and 155 can come from the Templar's Loyalty skill. If you find that you're a better defensive player and take hits less often, you can sacrifice some life regen for more offensive capabilities, either through gear or by switching Galvanizing Wind to Glass Cannon.

The Playstyle

A lot of this you will pick up on your own via trial and error, but I'll lay the foundation for how to approach this build. Beyond that, perfecting your play in Hell and Inferno is just a matter of experience.

Engaging a regular pack of enemies:

Spot enemies from afar. Drop a hydra between you and them Drop a blizzard on top of them (should occur as the hydra begins to attack) Drop a blizzard between you and them, so that they're chilled the entire time they try to walk at you. As long as they're not on your ass, shift+click to fire your Piercing Orb into the pack.

If they're slow enemies, continue moving backward and dropping blizzards between you and them to continue snaring them. Move your hydra as necessary.

If they're fast enemies, they may be all over your ass. If that happens, teleport, blizzard your landing area, and move back a bit to allow them to engage your mirror images. If they continue to engage you, you can always pop diamond skin to tank a few hits. Each hit you take with diamond skin, if it absorbs more than 15% of your health, will proc illusionist. Even if you didn't actually take any damage, illusionist will still proc. That means that if there's one or two enemies, and one of them is pounding on you, every single time he hits you you can teleport, and there will only be a 33% chance that he'll continue to engage you (because of the two mirror images).

Whenever you're not running to gain space, casting blizzard, or dropping hydras, use piercing orb. It really adds significantly to your damage output when you can use it as a stop-gap.

Engaging a pack of elites / hero with minions

Save your teleport and diamond skin for when you really need them (i.e. you got vortex'd, or you got walled, or you got jailed, and they're all over you). If you're in a comfortable position and you'd like your teleport cooldown to be ready (say you're anticipating a wall), you can always allow one to catch up to you and take a swing, which you'll quickly regenerate from, and you'll have your teleport ready and willing to go.

When using teleport for the mirror images, if you're comfortable with your current health and defense status, its often a good idea to only TP a few feet away. This will allow your mirror images to immediately begin attacking the elites (which will draw the elites attention towards them), so you can then have some breathing room. If the elites are wrecking you and you're just fighting for survival, however, go ahead and TP as far away as you can. TP every single time you take a hit.