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+27

In-geom/Tal/Firebird variation for GR 60+, 2-4 min clears, quick and dirty gem leveling

by last updated Feb 11, 2016 ( Patch 2.4 )
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Skills

  • Electrocute Arc Lightning
  • Teleport Calamity
  • Diamond Skin Prism
  • Energy Armor Force Armor
  • Explosive Blast Chain Reaction
  • Frost Nova Frozen Mist
  • Audacity
  • Illusionist
  • Evocation
  • Elemental Exposure

Items

More Details

  • Legendary Gems

    • Bane of the Trapped
    • Bane of the Stricken
    • Taeguk

Kanai's Cube

  • In-geom
  • Aquila Cuirass
  • Ring of Royal Grandeur

Helm and gloves are interchangeable slots, that's why there's 2 items with "required". Just use the better combination available to you.

Tal Rasha chest has 5 primary stats instead of 4, it comes with attack speed prerolled, and you want to get a piece that lets you reroll it. This is why you always want to use it over Firebirds chest.

Leggings are interchangeable as well, but there's very little gain as it's just a toughness slot. It's harder to find good gloves or helm, so that option is better used there.

Sockets on rings/neck/chest are mandatory, I just couldn't fit them into the priority lists.

Use CDR gem in helm.

If you can reroll damage on your Wand of Woh, get Arcane or Frost damage. This is for a quicker a application of Elemental Exposure stack

Paragon Priorities

Core

Movement Speed
Primary Stat
Maximum Resource
Vitality

Offense

Cooldown Reduction
Critical Hit Chance
Critical Hit Damage
Attack Speed

Defense

Armor
Life
Resist All
Life Regeneration

Utility

Resource Cost Reduction
Area Damage
Life on Hit
Gold Find

Build Guide

I run this build in GR 62 currently, clearing it in 2 to 4 minutes depending on density and which Guardian I get (solo). My paragon level is 800, I have only 7 ancient items, and that doesn't even include the weapon (and my rings/neck aren't perfect rolls). My gems are level 73, 75 and 55. What I'm trying to say is, GR 62 is definitely not the limit, and someone with better gear and higher paragon can probably do this same thing on a much higher tier.

This build is just a variation of the Firebirds/Tal Rasha build people use for TX speedruns. I'll assume you're familiar with the basics of it, I'll just explain the differences for GR specifically, since most of the guides are about TX rifts where surviving is trivial and guide makers don't talk about it much.

Replace Storm Armor/Scramble with Energy Armor/Force Armor. Run speed doesn't help if you're dead, and you kind of need to stop to kill elites anyway unlike in TX rifts. Ice Armor isn't an option because you can't fit Halo of Arlyse into this build, and Ice Armor isn't very strong on its own. Both of the defensive runes are viable (I've ran both and I can't decide which one is better).

Taeguk. The armor bonus multiplies nicely with Energy Armor, and if you have enough CDR, you can keep stacking the buff up indefinitely even without In-geom procced. As such, having very high CDR is mandatory for this particular variation to work. I believe the exact number this becomes possible is 56%. I'd say 58-60% is where this becomes comfortable to play, which means you need CDR on every slot including the Wand of Woh, or at least strictly 8% on everything but the weapon. Keeping up Taeguk up during In-geom downtime will at first feel frustrating and annoying, but it's really not that hard; I run this build with 56.5% CDR, and I have to press EB only after it comes off cooldown (pressing a button just before it refreshes actually delays your cast! you can't press that button again for ~0.1sec). Just train a habit to only press skills that are definitely off cooldown, it's a better habit than mashing keys anyway in this game. Keep in mind that you can also cast Energy Armor as a backup if you don't feel confident - I used to do this a lot while traveling between packs and such, where it doesn't really matter and I'm more busy looking at the minimap and navigating than looking at my bars.

The other significant gameplay difference is that you need to pay attention and not drop below 90% arcane power while tanking damage. Casting Explosive Blast without Diamond Skin does that (for like half a second), and you need to be aware of it. Diamond Skin is just an absorb shield: when you press it, a shield equal to 40% of your Life pops up. If that shield breaks, you lose the cost reduction of Prism rune too. Don't just brainlessly mash the keys, make sure you use an EB simultaneously with the DS, with the DS going first and not the other way around; stagger your EB casts if you know your DS is dropping (when tanking a whole ton of things for example), cast like 2-3 with the DS but then stop and wait for the next DS to be up; you can look at the buff duration bar of DS to see how fast its dropping to get an idea of when you should go into wait mode. If you need to press EB while your DS isn't up at all (fighting a pack without In-geom up), try to dodge damage during this timeframe. You can just Teleport out, press EB, walk back in; Illusionist makes this possible whenever you want to (Calamity gives Teleport a stun on arrival as well, you can use that as a window to cast EB as well vs controllable mobs). There's way too many scenarios to talk about them one by one, but understanding how your spells interact with one another can improve your performance with this spec despite how spammy it is, and is especially important when it comes to killing packs without In-geom up.

That's about it. Some notes and tips:

  1. The most important thing about this is picking the right difficulty. It should feel like you're doing TX rifts, farming them in 2-4 minutes per. Elites should basically always die while you're exploding at a crazy rate (to give you a rough idea: 3-5 seconds of In-geom buff uptime, and then another 2-3 seconds of trailing super explosions should be enough; check the attached video, I recorded one of my runs). If you frequently end up fighting without In-geom up, then you're doing something the build isn't meant for, you're slow at navigating the map, or you're unlucky and the rift is actually bad. If you're clearing in 6-8 minutes, for example, then a non-In-geom build could probably clear just as fast but a much higher tier, ergo this is a waste of keystones. The whole point of doing this build is that you will consistently close rifts in less than 5 minutes and level gems very quickly while not sacrificing too much of your loot/xp per rift;
  2. Don't forget to actually cast Frost Nova on packs. For some reason, nobody cares about Frost Nova (I've even seen a guide that says "you only need to cast it once for the Tal Rasha stack"), but it applies a stack of Elemental Exposure and causes a frost Meteor to drop from the Tal Rasha setbonus. It's definitely not that useless;
  3. You need to kill unique (yellow) packs completely in order for them to proc In-geom. You can't leave the minions;
  4. Try to spawn the Guardian by killing an elite pack. Slow down with killing trash at >90%;
  5. And once again, this build sacrifices keystones and a bit of xp for faster gem levels. You could be doing 75-80s in groups instead of this (according to sources, empowering rifts past 77 isn't worth it, so that's what you should aim for in your gem upgrade speed runs; these groups usually take 8-10 min to clear). Loot per time is roughly equal, possibly even higher since we do two rifts instead of one, but xp per hour is definitely going to be lower. My mission here was to take the Wizards fastest spec rifting spec, push it to the limit in GR, and then use it for gem leveling from 1 whenever it's needed;
  6. Gear your follower if you're soloing.