Use a dps calculator or sreadsheet to compare. My MH+OH is about the same dps for me as a 1450 dps skorn with high crit damage so I'm guessing the 1h+OH will give higher dps. If you're worried about reflect mobs, you can keep the skorn and swap to it if you don't want to get a 1h with life steal. Perosnally I prefer using a 1h with life steal because I hate losing the magic weapon buff from weapon swapping.
I'd say the Slorak's Madness would be fine if you could keep above 2.5 APS, but below 2.5 is definitely not worth it.
Regarding Slow Time, I don't really like it against Mag because the swarms begin to stack and it really sucks just insta dying when you get 2-4 stacked on top of each other. Otherwise I like it for the 20% group dps, but like you I greatly prefer teleport (I use fracture for party rezzing). I really hate the siegebreaker fight because I can't lock Keule in place so having teleport to get out of his bubble is great, as well as teleporting after Keule teleports away.
Honestly I don't use that formula since the recommended value is like 8-9 and I found a max dps gain at like 6.5 with my current stats (2.5 APS, 20 APoC, 46% crit) and 100 ms reaction time. It seems more like a rule of thumb thing that is best used to tell when you're actually over saturation on AP. For example, if you're above 9, you can drop some crit or APoC with minimal performance loss, if any.
EB is mostly for DPS purposes. It costs 20 AP and only has an effective coefficient of 1/3 per cast. WW costs 35 AP but tics 36 times at 2.73 I think, for an effective coefficient of 36/8 = 4.5 per cast, which is considerably higher than EB. Single target you might have some white attacks if you use EB, particularly if your crit is on the lower side, so ignoring EB single target will slightly increase your FN uptime. Whether it's significant or not, I haven't really looked into, and when both bosses are together I start casting EB again until one moves away.
I wouldn't recommend dropping EB for anything, since it's great for the other bosses, and you won't really gain anything from LL because you're always casting WW anyway, so you won't have any time to cast LL. Also, EB doesn't use an attack animation whereas almost any other dps skill you might consider using instead of it will likely require an attack animation. Slow Time is about the only skill I would even think of considering as a replacement, assuming you don't use it already (I use teleport for MP7, Slow Time for MP6).
In short, EB = dps skill, WW = CM procing. Replacing EB for a CM proc spell doesn't really make sense.
I haven't tried MP8 yet but I don't see why the strat would be much different than MP7. What I do as CM is focus on Mag. I use teleport as my extra skill so I teleport to her at the start and just do my best to keep her frozen as much as possible. I don't use EB on her, just WW, FN, and DS for better FN uptime, and I try to position myself between mag and the group so when she shoots out some swarms it's more likely to hit me than get by to chase them around.
The other players need to just not die, so if an attack one shots them, they either need to avoid it, or get more mitigation to not die. There's not really much more you can do besides trying to reach the 3.0 APS breakpoint and raising your crit higher to keep mag locked more. Even then she'll still throw out some sentries and probably still shoot some swams, from what I hear.
Rough estimate of Mag's bee damage is about 150-200k on MP7, so about 220k on MP8. I'd say your GCs need around 300k EHP to safely survive a hit from her, but that's a pretty rough estimate from my experience of her bees hitting me for around 15k on MP7 with around 89% mitigation (including barb buff, I love that buff).
To be honest, i'd never use Mistral Breeze in a CM build, even with AP problems. It just doesn't do what you want it to so it's too inconsistant and unpredictable, even if you can throw a couple out at a time. 16-17 APoC is really easy and cheap to get and makes WW much more useful than MB. If you want to go low or no APoC, I'd say try a blades spec or the living lightning build people are curious about. However, I think WW is the best choice, since the APoC is pretty easy to get.
Attack speed and LoH are fairly important, though the amount of LoH you need depends on your gear overall. For now, you should probably aim to keep at least 500-800 LoH as you change gear around. Attack speed increases the effectiveness of LoH because it makes your WW produce more cm procs. I'm running with 890 or so and it works fairly well. I'm reluctant to drop any LoH because I find electrical mobs to be one of the most annoying at the moment and LoH helps a lot with that.
To me, I'd say crit > Attack speed since crit gives you more dps, more effective dps, and more CM procs, leading to more survivability. It would be useful to replace the neck with something that has high crit (8%+). If you can't get one with LoH, you can try swapping your helm to a storm crow for around 400 LoH. Another cheap source of LoH is Blackthorne pants, which is like the storm crow in that it comes with 300-400 or so LoH standard, plus it has a lot of vit and life% for decent EHP. Both pieces are relatively cheap too.
At your gear level I'd say focus more on raising your crit, dps, and EHP, in no particular order. Your APoC is fine, and you'll gain 1-2 when switching to a storm crow. With your current stats, I figure you could run MP3-5 with a decent dps spec, using either pinpoint barrier or storm armor with shocking aspect, and not have issues dying. With higher dps and slightly higher EHP you can raise the MP level for key farming and/or use an Archon spec to farm xp/loot at low MP levels without changing any gear. The best ways to raise your DPS are via crit, IAS, and Int, since all those stats improve survivability in addition to dps, while raising crit damage only raises dps.
Call me lazy but I wish there was an option to just auto reveal rare stats when they drop. For those who like the ID process, you could still turn it off and keep as is, but for those of us who would prefer to not waste time picking up and IDing rares, it would save a lot of time and hassle. Legendaries and set items are still rare enough that I'm fine with the ID time on them.
1) In terms of XP and loot efficiency, I'd say MP1-2 would be optimal. You can probably run MP3 with the Archon build, but I don't see it being as efficient since mobs have like 50% more health than MP2.
2) In my experience, Echoing fury is probably overpriced for wizards because we don't get as much out of the +0.2x attacks per second as dual wielding classes. My guess is you'd get more dps out of a 1k dps sword, wand, or dagger with a socket (and life steal).
3) I really suggest a CM melee spec for soloing uber bosses. It also works great in groups at high MP level or for high MP key farming. It's what I did, though i've only solod the bosses once. Keeping a few dps pieces like your chest, shoulders, and 2pc zuni, you can probably slap together a basic set with about 60-80k+ dps capable of soloing MP4-5 for a few million. The APoC is the tricky part, but you only need 2 pieces of gear with APoC. I use helm (storm crow) and OH (triumvirate). You'd likely want to grab some bracers with resist, 140+int, 4.5% crit, and maybe armor and/or vit as well as a necklace with 8+% crit (maybe one with good defensive stats like armor and resist all, should be able to fine one for 1 mil or less). I'd recommend some Blackthorn set pants, which you can get for pretty cheap, possibly with Armor on them for a tiny bit extra. They have high EHP and a little LoH.
Overall for soloing uber bosses I'd recommend around 40% crit, 3500-4k armor, 500+resists, 16+ APoC, 30-40k hp+ as a start with CM/WW spec with full defensive stats, though at MP4-5 with those stats you can probably use pinpoint barrier over prismatic armor. One of the limiting factors in soloing the bosses is the enrage timers, which may or may not be an issue except mainly for Siegebreaker since he and Kuele are quite tough to solo, compared to the other two.
Side Note: I never really considered swapping to a high LS 2h for RD packs. I might try doing that since I have the most problems with them, though it's annoying having Magic Weapon fall off when I swap weapons or OH, but it probably won't affect my farming all that much.
I have some interesting data that some might find interesting. What I did was kill Ghom a couple times on MP4 and record the times, using different specs. In particular I alternated between Storm Armor, Shocking Aspect rune, Pinpoint Barrier, Diamond Shards, and Prism. The test isn't very good for Prism because of the frequent aoe damage from his storm clouds, and with Shocking Aspect and either prism or shards I had some problems not dying, despite having almost 1300 LoH and 1.5% life steal, so that data might be a little off.
I started with a full defensive CM build with Crystal Shell, Prismatic Armor, and the CD reduction rune on frost nova, as well as Cold Blooded, CM, and Evocation as passives that were unchanged throughout. I took the fight time and my char sheet dps to compute the DPS Multiplier, which is the effective dps gain of the build. For example, at 100k dps using the full defensive build I would expect an effective dps of 247k. I also computed relative DPS of each spec meaning switching from Prismatic to Storm Armor increased dps by about 36%.
And in case there's any confusion, 'x' in the table means that skill was used.
Storm Armor
Shocking Aspect
Pinpoint
Shards
Prism
DPS Multiplier
Relative DPS
2.47
1
x
2.78
1.13
x
2.99
1.21
x
3.01
1.22
x
3.36
1.36
x
x
4.06
1.65
x
x
x
4.25
1.72
The interesting information is that Storm Armor is about a 36% dps gain over prismatic armor. When you add Shocking Aspect it's a 65% dps gain over prismatic armor and about a 36% dps gain over pinpoint barrier. Adding Diamond Shards further increases the dps gain but it's only about a 4% dps gain by itself when you use Shocking Aspect. The dramatic decrease in survivability for the fight makes it very not worthwhile, but that could easily change depending on the fight. Rak for example, would probably be just fine with DS or prism.
I also expect the values for Shocking Aspect to be dependent of crit and attack speed, since it only procs on crits and higher attack speed should lead to more procs from WW, so with 50% crit, I'd expect the damage to increase by about 16%, or I'd expect the total dps gain to be about 90%, for a relative dps of 1.9. With a crit % of 52% I would expect Shocking Aspect to double your dps over prismatic armor, roughly speaking, with the same APS of 1.965 or so.
For reference, my stats at the time of the data collection were 104k dps buffed (110k with pinpoint), 1.965 attacks per second, 20 APoC, 1298 LoH, 1.5% Life Steal, 641 resist all and 4588 armor unbuffed, with 40.5k hp and 43% crit with Scoundrel. I also had about 400 life per second regen, just to complete the stats.
The best way to look at the MP comparison, which has been going around the threads a lot, is the relative increase in farm run time with each successive MP level. Neglecting the bonus item, the general conclusion was keep increasing MP level until it takes you about 10% longer to farm that level than the one below it. The reason was the relatively small MF gain per level. With the bonus item, we still need to know more about how it works. For example, does it work for EACH item that drops from a monster, or just when any items drops, there's a chance for ONE extra to drop? There's quite a bit of difference between the two and how it works can make a significant difference is how we decide what act to farm.
Example, going from MP1 to MP2, you gain 25% MF, but with no MF on gear, you already have 100 MF with NV, so you only go to 125% MF. That's a relative increase in legendaries of (225/200) = 1.125 times, or you gain 12.5% more legendaries on average. Monster health increases by 50% compared to MP1, and you only get about 7% more bonus items, so even if it applies towards each drop your net gain of legendaries is 1.125*1.07 = 1.2 or about 20% overall increase in legendaries, on average. So if it takes 20% longer to make a clear of your farm route, you about break even on the legendaries and gain a bit more xp, so it's worth it. However, if it takes 50% longer, because the mobs have 50% more health, it is not worth it because you can just farm the lower MP level faster to get more XP per hour, more legendaries per hour (on average), etc.
Similar analysis can be done for any increase in MP but it should be done on a level to level basis, not MP1 vs MP6, for example, because your decision is most likely going to be how high to crank it up.
As an Archon wizard I'll probably keep it at MP1-2 because if the mob hp increases much more I won't be able to keep Archon active which drastically slows my farm time.
1
1
Regarding Slow Time, I don't really like it against Mag because the swarms begin to stack and it really sucks just insta dying when you get 2-4 stacked on top of each other. Otherwise I like it for the 20% group dps, but like you I greatly prefer teleport (I use fracture for party rezzing). I really hate the siegebreaker fight because I can't lock Keule in place so having teleport to get out of his bubble is great, as well as teleporting after Keule teleports away.
Honestly I don't use that formula since the recommended value is like 8-9 and I found a max dps gain at like 6.5 with my current stats (2.5 APS, 20 APoC, 46% crit) and 100 ms reaction time. It seems more like a rule of thumb thing that is best used to tell when you're actually over saturation on AP. For example, if you're above 9, you can drop some crit or APoC with minimal performance loss, if any.
1
I wouldn't recommend dropping EB for anything, since it's great for the other bosses, and you won't really gain anything from LL because you're always casting WW anyway, so you won't have any time to cast LL. Also, EB doesn't use an attack animation whereas almost any other dps skill you might consider using instead of it will likely require an attack animation. Slow Time is about the only skill I would even think of considering as a replacement, assuming you don't use it already (I use teleport for MP7, Slow Time for MP6).
In short, EB = dps skill, WW = CM procing. Replacing EB for a CM proc spell doesn't really make sense.
1
The other players need to just not die, so if an attack one shots them, they either need to avoid it, or get more mitigation to not die. There's not really much more you can do besides trying to reach the 3.0 APS breakpoint and raising your crit higher to keep mag locked more. Even then she'll still throw out some sentries and probably still shoot some swams, from what I hear.
Rough estimate of Mag's bee damage is about 150-200k on MP7, so about 220k on MP8. I'd say your GCs need around 300k EHP to safely survive a hit from her, but that's a pretty rough estimate from my experience of her bees hitting me for around 15k on MP7 with around 89% mitigation (including barb buff, I love that buff).
1
1
To me, I'd say crit > Attack speed since crit gives you more dps, more effective dps, and more CM procs, leading to more survivability. It would be useful to replace the neck with something that has high crit (8%+). If you can't get one with LoH, you can try swapping your helm to a storm crow for around 400 LoH. Another cheap source of LoH is Blackthorne pants, which is like the storm crow in that it comes with 300-400 or so LoH standard, plus it has a lot of vit and life% for decent EHP. Both pieces are relatively cheap too.
At your gear level I'd say focus more on raising your crit, dps, and EHP, in no particular order. Your APoC is fine, and you'll gain 1-2 when switching to a storm crow. With your current stats, I figure you could run MP3-5 with a decent dps spec, using either pinpoint barrier or storm armor with shocking aspect, and not have issues dying. With higher dps and slightly higher EHP you can raise the MP level for key farming and/or use an Archon spec to farm xp/loot at low MP levels without changing any gear. The best ways to raise your DPS are via crit, IAS, and Int, since all those stats improve survivability in addition to dps, while raising crit damage only raises dps.
1
1
2) In my experience, Echoing fury is probably overpriced for wizards because we don't get as much out of the +0.2x attacks per second as dual wielding classes. My guess is you'd get more dps out of a 1k dps sword, wand, or dagger with a socket (and life steal).
3) I really suggest a CM melee spec for soloing uber bosses. It also works great in groups at high MP level or for high MP key farming. It's what I did, though i've only solod the bosses once. Keeping a few dps pieces like your chest, shoulders, and 2pc zuni, you can probably slap together a basic set with about 60-80k+ dps capable of soloing MP4-5 for a few million. The APoC is the tricky part, but you only need 2 pieces of gear with APoC. I use helm (storm crow) and OH (triumvirate). You'd likely want to grab some bracers with resist, 140+int, 4.5% crit, and maybe armor and/or vit as well as a necklace with 8+% crit (maybe one with good defensive stats like armor and resist all, should be able to fine one for 1 mil or less). I'd recommend some Blackthorn set pants, which you can get for pretty cheap, possibly with Armor on them for a tiny bit extra. They have high EHP and a little LoH.
Overall for soloing uber bosses I'd recommend around 40% crit, 3500-4k armor, 500+resists, 16+ APoC, 30-40k hp+ as a start with CM/WW spec with full defensive stats, though at MP4-5 with those stats you can probably use pinpoint barrier over prismatic armor. One of the limiting factors in soloing the bosses is the enrage timers, which may or may not be an issue except mainly for Siegebreaker since he and Kuele are quite tough to solo, compared to the other two.
Side Note: I never really considered swapping to a high LS 2h for RD packs. I might try doing that since I have the most problems with them, though it's annoying having Magic Weapon fall off when I swap weapons or OH, but it probably won't affect my farming all that much.
1
I started with a full defensive CM build with Crystal Shell, Prismatic Armor, and the CD reduction rune on frost nova, as well as Cold Blooded, CM, and Evocation as passives that were unchanged throughout. I took the fight time and my char sheet dps to compute the DPS Multiplier, which is the effective dps gain of the build. For example, at 100k dps using the full defensive build I would expect an effective dps of 247k. I also computed relative DPS of each spec meaning switching from Prismatic to Storm Armor increased dps by about 36%.
And in case there's any confusion, 'x' in the table means that skill was used.
The interesting information is that Storm Armor is about a 36% dps gain over prismatic armor. When you add Shocking Aspect it's a 65% dps gain over prismatic armor and about a 36% dps gain over pinpoint barrier. Adding Diamond Shards further increases the dps gain but it's only about a 4% dps gain by itself when you use Shocking Aspect. The dramatic decrease in survivability for the fight makes it very not worthwhile, but that could easily change depending on the fight. Rak for example, would probably be just fine with DS or prism.
I also expect the values for Shocking Aspect to be dependent of crit and attack speed, since it only procs on crits and higher attack speed should lead to more procs from WW, so with 50% crit, I'd expect the damage to increase by about 16%, or I'd expect the total dps gain to be about 90%, for a relative dps of 1.9. With a crit % of 52% I would expect Shocking Aspect to double your dps over prismatic armor, roughly speaking, with the same APS of 1.965 or so.
For reference, my stats at the time of the data collection were 104k dps buffed (110k with pinpoint), 1.965 attacks per second, 20 APoC, 1298 LoH, 1.5% Life Steal, 641 resist all and 4588 armor unbuffed, with 40.5k hp and 43% crit with Scoundrel. I also had about 400 life per second regen, just to complete the stats.
1
Example, going from MP1 to MP2, you gain 25% MF, but with no MF on gear, you already have 100 MF with NV, so you only go to 125% MF. That's a relative increase in legendaries of (225/200) = 1.125 times, or you gain 12.5% more legendaries on average. Monster health increases by 50% compared to MP1, and you only get about 7% more bonus items, so even if it applies towards each drop your net gain of legendaries is 1.125*1.07 = 1.2 or about 20% overall increase in legendaries, on average. So if it takes 20% longer to make a clear of your farm route, you about break even on the legendaries and gain a bit more xp, so it's worth it. However, if it takes 50% longer, because the mobs have 50% more health, it is not worth it because you can just farm the lower MP level faster to get more XP per hour, more legendaries per hour (on average), etc.
Similar analysis can be done for any increase in MP but it should be done on a level to level basis, not MP1 vs MP6, for example, because your decision is most likely going to be how high to crank it up.
As an Archon wizard I'll probably keep it at MP1-2 because if the mob hp increases much more I won't be able to keep Archon active which drastically slows my farm time.