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Quote from Grimy_Bunyip

Are there any skills other than cluster arrow that are comparable in damage in a single hit?

Because from my understanding, cluster arrow is a bit slow so it gives players time to cast a defensive spell or dodge.
Same goes for spells like seven sided strike.

Is there any instant attack that does huge amounts of damage?

While I don't know about demon hunters, Archon (Arcane Destruction) for wizards does 1600% weapon damage as arcane instantly to everything in a fairly wide radius.

A stacked Archon Wizard with a 1000 DPS physical damage one hander with 100% crit damage and a socket, a perfect triumvirate, perfect zuni boots, 2000 Int, can have over 50% crit and 485% crit damage and 26% increased damage from elemental, on a baseline of around 1400 average damage per hit. Add in Glass Cannon (15% damage) Force Weapon (15% damage) and Sparkflint (12% damage) and your non-crit damage is: 801,561, with critical hits weighing in at 3.89 million damage.

You only get one shot every 2 minutes before you have to resort to ONLY disintigration wave dealing an average of around 400K damage per second, and 800K crits in a radius around you from arcane blasts.

I think that decreasing the supply of genuinely high end items by nerfing stats as items are traded will flood the mid level inferno gear market even more horribly than it is and will exasperate the price gap between "good" items and "the best" items rather than lower it. If you close the performance delta between the very best items and the average items such that high end performance could be attained from a much wider spectrum of stat rolls then you might see an increase in interest and demand for those items.

Quote from Qoffee

Quick question about G02A.

You have energy twister listed with the storm chaser rune. But there is no signature spell in the build ?
Am i missing something or is that really a waste of a rune?

Currently the storm chaser rune has a much higher proc coefficient than the rest of energy twister (which is either a bug or the inability in the code to specify different coefficient for different parts of the spell). Either way, in spite of the lack of signature spell to unleash the wind charge tornado storm chaser is the most efficient rune for generating critical mass procs which is what that build is trying to do.

I love the guide, but I feel the evolution of critical mass builds as you attain certain EHP thresholds should be listed as an archon alternative at the third gear level. Changing Energy Armor (Prismatic Armor) for Storm Armor (Shocking Aspect), and to a lesser extent changing the Diamond Skin rune to Diamond Shards or Blur to Glass Cannon as you gear gets up to huge EHP levels makes that build clear much faster (though not as fast as archon).

Quote from Loroese

The thoughts are that while the armor and resist bonuses on Energy Armor and Prismatic Armor have been reduced, the armor and resists on Archon might not be changed, so the 25% less damage mobs do is evened out with changes to EA and PA, but when you're in Archon form, you get an effective 25% increase to EHP compared to now because of the lack of changes to Archon form.

Exactly. Essentially it would lower the defensive requirements to run an archon build by a fair margin, which makes the gear for it an order of magnitude less expensive (because gear with good offensive stats is an order of magnitude more common than gear with good offensive stats AND good EHP stats).

Archon can clear the high density areas generally faster than CM can already at the high end of gear, and can get higher DPS at most price points because it isn't weighting its gear heavily towards max crit chance combined with EHP stats, and doesn't need a high threshold of APoC to run properly, so even without a nerf to Storm Chaser its likely the build of choice if archon's EHP scaling goes unnerfed.

Quote from Laxlegenden

Tried storm armor - shocking aspect with my CM build... never gonna look back again - IT'S INSANE.

Exactly. I'm giddy with the tought that this rune or the baseline storm armor might end up buffed in 1.0.5 as well, been running shocking aspect for 2 weeks, never switching back.

I'm curious how the relative buff/nerf of damage vs Prismatic Armor will work out given scaling monster difficulty and infernal machine, but I'm not worried about baseline inferno scaling. I'm just hoping the baseline will be adjusted that I can run increased monster power farm runs with my current setup and have around the same survivability I do now.

Count me in, US servers

From what I read, this is an absolutely enormous buff to Archon, whose 40% baseline buff to both armor and resistances isn't being touched according to that blog, but inferno damage is being nerfed by 25%. This likely means archon builds will become viable even at very modest gear levels.

Quote from nightwolf

looks like this will be another major buff to the CM wizard.

Storm Armor for everyone!

I die a lot right now because I can't bring myself to go back to Energy Armor, even though I should given my gear.

Quote from phatosen

Quote from AlucardIX

http://us.battle.net...opic/6521343540
People always bash on WW barbs nowadays...

This guy truly has it figured out. Don't kill mah WW-barb! Being disconnected every 10 mins because of WW is bad enough...

His point about barbarian gear is moot. Barbarian gear is more expensive because of how fast they farm exp and blast through content, and consequently how popular they are, it is not a justification for the efficiency ceiling differential. It probably takes similar amounts of gold to put together most builds (Critical Mass, Double Tornado, or equivalent DH, WD, and Monk builds) to the point of being able to farm act 3 comfortablty, but the payoff at the end is clearly weighted towards barbarians right now when we talk about very high end gearsets. I'd rather they focused on making other classes and other builds of barbarian just as viable but its hard to see them doing that efficiently without tying moving faster into killing faster the way the tornado build does, which won't lead to a lot of build diversity.

As to 1.0.5's mystery changes that will wind up as buffs even though they look like nerfs, I suspect as others do something like the following. How damage reduction is calculated is going to change substantially through a buffing of the baseline damage reduction of armor and resistances, and to compensate for that skills like War Cry and Energy Armor and passives like them are going to be nerfed to roughly the same effect they have now in terms of damage reduction gains. The reason for this being two fold: first, for pretty much every class that has an effect like this, it is the most ubiquitous skill of that class, and in the case of some (wizards primarily) it is locking out other skills and runes because of it, making those skills under-utilized. Second, damage relative to EHP probably needs to come down some before PVP goes live to prevent it from being an affair made up completely of one shots where temporary damage immunity skills reign supreme.

US player, good luck everyone

Quote from Kash1988

now, all CC is reduced to 25% duration on inferno
post 1.0.5 CC will be reduced to MAXIMUM 35% so yea

/thread

Elite mobs have 35% CC duration now, while white mobs takes the full duration. After the patch ALL mobs will have a diminishing returns of 10% reduced CC duration per second they are CC'd to a maximum of 65% resistance. This resistance decays by 10% per second they are not CC'd.

This means it will now be possible to Nova lock elite packs the same way as normal mobs for the first 6-8 seconds of the fight, at which point they will reach a steady state of 50% frost nova uptime unless your engine is running hard enough to Nova lock them with 35% duration (i.e. you could full nova lock them as they are live).

It also means that you can only Nova lock white mobs as long as you can elites, so easy fights get harder (but not much harder) and hard fights get considerably easier, so its a net buff.

Quote from not_kurt_russel

Quote from Brake Failure

More than half of those levels were done with 5 stacks in Act 3 as well... God I'm unlucky.

what was your overall mf? im confused about why people post about their paragon levels and expect these drops to suddenly appear as if it supposed to guarentee them legendaries. if your mf only comes from nv and pLvl, then you still have very low mf and your chances are still very slim even with 105% mf.

People post their Paragon Level as a measure of how much they have killed. RNG is RNG though. I am Paragon Level 15 on my wizard, and have found 1 legendary in that time, running with around 125% MF before Valor and Paragon are counted, so between 200% and 245% during that time. My paragon level 4 double tornado barb with 17% magic find from gear has found 4 legendaries since the patch.

Quote from Thelbkaarn

I'm quite amazed about the numbers of people who are not able to read a simple text... The number of people thinking it's a nerf while it's a buff to CC is really huge. (here and on official website) Same for all the CM wiz who think their build will be destroyed whenactually it will not change anything for them Oo

Actually it will have an effect, it will change the playstyle around nova locking things a lot. At 65% reduction, Frost Nova slows down Elites and Bosses for 1.05 seconds right now. It takes just under 11 CM procs per second (22 crits per second with Strom Chaser, 55 ticks per second with 40% crit, which generally requires 20 or so mobs to accomplish) to fully nova lock an elite group. Now on every set of mobs, normal and elite, nova locking reaches that level after the first 6.5 seconds of the fight.

Having Frost Nova cool in 6 seconds takes 1 proc per second, 2 crits per second, which is 5 ticks per second from a storm chaser. This happens pretty easily on a single target and produces 50% nova uptime now, and will produce 50% nova uptime afterwards. After reaching a steady state after 6.5 seconds, it will require a nova cooldown of 2.1 seconds to improve upon this. Thats about 10 procs in 2 seconds, 5 per second, 10 crits per second, 22 ticks per second, 12-15 mobs in combat most likely. So essentially nova locking normal mobs got capped at 50% uptime when you are fighting groups of 10 or less mobs. This uptime corresponds to the uptime on Bone Chill and Cold Blooded for that build, essentially nerfing its damage output by 12-15% against all but the largest enemy packs.

On the flip side, its now trivial to obtain a 50% nova lock on elite groups which will increase CM wizard damage and reduce incoming damage against fights where you just run into an elite pack substantially.

From my perspective as a CM wizard the easy fights got harder and the hard fights got easier, which I can be excited about I guess. I think it will up the gear barrier to use the spec in later inferno because you will actually have to contend with the damage from large pulls in act 3. The place I really don't like it is fallen maniacs in act 3, not being able to full nova lock them essentially forever while I get around to killing them is going to end up with them exploding on my face a lot more.

Quote from SilverTaurus

The moment the freeze ends, a witch doctor casts Horrify which fears the monster for 4 seconds. Since the monster has 30% CC resistance, it’s actually only feared for 2.8 seconds (3 seconds * 70% CC effectiveness = 2.8 seconds).

I dont get this math =p

30% CC resistance means the effect has 30% less than its normal duration or 70% of its normal duration remaining. 4*0.7 = 2.8 seconds

Quote from Aggnog

People actually need nova lockdown these days?

Using Bone Chill and Cold Blooded makes it nova lock useful for the extra damage even if you have the gear to tank it straight up.

I think what you need to do is swap to a build that is more efficient on damage and then work on your gear to improve your toughness some.

You only have one piece of Arcane Power on Crit gear, if you can find another I recommend swapping to a build without a signature spell, such as the following:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#VhXYOQ!gWZ!ccacca

If you can manage the 16-18 aracne power on crit this takes to run effectively it will do much more damage than your version despite lower tooltip damage.

Specific Rune Choice stuff:

Storm Chaser vs Wicked Wind - While wicked wind is easier to aim and keep on target, all of the energy twister runes other than Storm Chaser had their proc coefficients nerfed in 1.0.4 so Storm Chaser, so it is the easiest to proc

Explosive Blast - When you get rolling, spamming explosive blast (chain reaction) will give you more damage per arcane power than any other wizard spell, and with crtiical mass you can cast mutilple per second, resulting in pretty rediculous damage. I finished the game with only 20,000 tooltip DPS and had no trouble killing things in short order, taking not much longer than 30-40 seconds to finish off elite packs unless I had to do a lot of teleporting to stay alive. Some packs I had to swap to a shield bringing my tooltip dps down to 13K, and I could still kill in relatively short order.

Frost Nova (Bone Chill) - when you have 5+ mobs in frost nova range, you are going to have enough ticks to run your cooldown spells as fast as you can spam the buttons, it really isn't an issue of more crit (though you should probably get more crit on your gear if you can manage it). 15% additional damage on top of the 20% from Cold Blooded is what you really leverage to get a lot of damage done really quickly.

Teleport (Safe Passage) - I really can't stress this skill enough. There are three reasons for using this, which make the hardest elite packs much easier to do. Reason one is Safe Passage's damage reduction buff. When your engine is rolling you can tap this button every 4 seconds to keep the damage reduction rolling all the time. 30% reduced damage is absurdly powerful and lowers the tankiness of the gear you need to survive high damage elite packs (Molten, Fire Chains, Desecrator) by a significant amount. The second reason is Frozen, getting out of Frozen to keep your engine rolling is critically important in act 3 and beyond and these packs are a lot easier when you have control of your character for the whole fight. The final reason is ranged mobs and mobs that like to kite you. With Storm Chaser you need to be as close as possible to the target to ensure it starts ticking and elusive mobs can stall your engine if they are in small numbers. Teleporting on top of them and frost nova freezing them gets lets you get the chain rolling and being able to jump out of a melee pack to get the ranged with some damage while tornados in progress roll your cooldowns is sometimes essential to survival.

If you are doing it right a large amount of life on hit, life steal, or the blood magic rune aren't necessary to survive, you should handle incidental damage easily with crystal shell and chain locking mobs in frost nova will prevent the vast majority of damage.

A large part in making this successful however is baseline damage reduction. You have a lot more health than I did (beat diablo with 24.5K hp) but a lot less in terms of defense. When spamming crystal shell your hit points should be largely irrelevant, as they won't break your shell before the next one comes up, at which point it is all about reducing the incoming damage to make those shells last longer.

My stats for farming act 3 and completing inferno are approximately:
21,000 DPS
24,500 HP
900 Resist All (1050 Physical Resist, 1000 Fire Resist)
6600 Armor
38% Crtiical Hit Chance (41% with the scoundrel)
414 Life on Hit
19 Arcane Power on Crit

I could swap out my source and helm for a shield and a wizard hat to make up the arcane power on crit and go to 13.5K DPS, 1000 Resist All, 8000 Armor while keeping Crit and APoC the same, which I had to do for a couple elite packs along the way.

Hope some of that info is helpful.