Any other Wizards out there?

[KingOfPain]

Blizzard/hydra kite tactics are also too mainstream

Hehe, I guess it is only mainstream if you read other guides and forums :neenernee

I personally have not been (avoiding, actually) looking up stuff yet. I always like a closed door period and find things out myself and not be influenced by the mainstream that you mentioned. But even here at RB, it seems Diamond Skin and Teleport is the mainstream, which I have not been using at all other than the passing look see. I am still PO at Bliz for nerfing Teleport (it's like cutting off your toe to avoid worm bites ). That ability alone defines a sorcy. You can turn Chain Lightning into Electrocute and Fireball into Arcane Orb but a toon who can't just blink around at will just don't feel like a sorcy to me. Maybe that's why I am loving the DH now, she can backflip all the way home.

[Tyrmith]

All the way home until you run out of discipline. :P

I like having diamond skin, it turns things from a "I must never be hit" to "When is it right to run away, and when is it right to soak damage". Much more interesting imo.

[Pingu]

Yay! Big D fell down!

How? As easy as ditching Blur and Prodigy and getting Galvanizing Ward and Temporal Flux.

Amazing how changing two passives can help so much.

Hell here we come!

[uberfish]

I actually dropped teleport for force armour during A2 inferno (using Critical Mass instead of Illusionist as the cooldown resetting passive, so I could also get Diamond Skin back up - I have the gear to support this) and managed to clear the act that way. Yeah I died quite a bit. I didn't use a shield and this led to interesting situations where due to the way Force Armour works, I would mostly get 3-shot but get frequent casts on diamondskin and mirror image to extend my lifespan. This made swarmers like Spiderlings generally a lot more dangerous than large monsters. Also elemental damage elites, especially on fast base enemy types, were by far the biggest problems. Plague pools, burning ground from molten, and so on do a ton of damage on Inferno. I ended up skipping an invulnerable minion pack and one with fast/firechains.

I do find that decoys make it a lot easier to land a good meteor, and meteor triggers effects like life-on-hit, AP-on-crit, and critical mass extremely well because of the fire field it leaves behind.

In act 3 some enemy types are now doing enough melee damage that Force Armour no longer mitigates it to 35%. I still managed to clear the first third, but rather than simply throwing more gear at the problem, I think now is a good time to experiment with other builds while waiting to see what patch 1.03 brings in terms of level 60 balance.

[Tyrmith]

I was trying out the ice meteor in a team game after largely neglecting meteor since I first had access to the spell and I was really liking it. The primary problem though is that it's very hard to hit anything that moves very fast at all. Since I could stand in the back though, I was comboing it with force weapon and the sparkflint familier for the 27% extra damage, and man, was it crushing everything when I actually did hit stuff, especially since stuff gets really slowed in the afteraffect damage. I did feel constantly starved for arcane energy, but it was very interesting.

[uberfish]

The best Meteor setup for DPS is probably Star Pact + AP-on-crit if you have access to the right gear.

BTW, Force Weapon actually displays a 30%+ damage increase rather than the 15% it says on the tooltip. Bug?

[Tyrmith]

From what I've heard the tooltip is bugged.

[uberfish]

Yeah I find it hard to believe that they'd make one rune do 30% and the others ~10%, and the increase definitely doesn't feel as powerful as 30% in practice.

[Tyrmith]

Wizard myths tested and debunked! Interesting article

[xenin]

Killed the big D on inferno last night with my relatively cruddily geared wizard - pleased to 'finish' the game before the inferno nerfs. I actually had quite a lot of fun on the act 4 bosses, going from dying at 99% to slowly getting them down as I worked out better tactics (although rakanoth is still a terribly designed fight) - I blew about 150k on repairs + pots for diablo

Overall I think the wizard is pretty fun, with only a few useless skills. At 60 I think I used almost all of them at some point, with the exception of twister, explosive blast, the non-energy armors and electrocute/spectral blade. Credit to whoever did the graphics for wave of force in particular, it looks super cool when you are reflecting with it and when it's not bouncing projectiles that are already past you back into you.