Legendary Items

• Tal Rasha’s Elements (Helmet, Chest, Gloves, Boots, Amulet)
  • (2): Damaging enemies with Arcane, Cold, Fire or Lightning will grant immunity to that element and cause a Meteor of the same damage type to fall from the sky. The same meteor cannot happen twice in a row. – This is a massive change to the basics of the set as now you will be constantly auto-casting an elemental meteor as long as you damage an enemy with a different element as they removed the 8 second cooldown per elemental type. Also, you will gain immunity which sounds insane. It’s not specified how long the immunity buff last but I’m wondering if combined with an amulet or Blackthorne’s if you can achieve complete damage immunity? Also, as a 2 set bonus, the defensive buff is pretty great which could help early builds lacking a complete 6 set and/or Ring of Royal Grandeur.
  • (4): Arcane, Cold, Fire, and Lightning attacks each increase all of your resistances by 50% for 8 seconds. – This is another major change as they’ve effectively doubled your resistance from the current 4 set bonus. So as long as you’re doing elemental damage from one of the four listed, you should have good damage immunity all around.
  • (6): Attacks increase your damage by 2000% for 8 seconds. Arcane, Cold, Fire, and Lightning attacks each add one stack. At 4 stacks, each different elemental attack extends the duration by 2 seconds, up to a maximum of 8 seconds. – Nothing has changed here. But I think now that you’re constantly triggering Meteors to fall from the sky, you should be doing far more consistent damage.
    
• Captain Crimson’s Trimmings (belt, pants) – Mostly for the resource reduction which will compliment your damage boost from it.

• Mantle of Channeling (shoulders) – While channeling Siphon Blood, Whirlwind, Rapid Fire, Strafe, Tempest Rush, Firebats, Arcane Torrent, Disintegrate, or Ray of Frost, you deal 24% increased damage and take 25% reduced damage. [20 – 25]% – There’s not a lot of options for the shoulder slot for Tal Rasha’s so this is one of the better options.

• Pauldrons of the Skeleton King (shoulders/optional) – When receiving fatal damage, there is a chance that you are instead restored to 25% of maximum Life and cause nearby enemies to flee in fear. – This is another reasonable option for Tal Rasha’s. The idea here is that you can take out Unstable Anomaly as a passive skill since you will be getting a cheat death through this mechanism.

• The Smoldering Core (staff/weapon slot/cube) – Lesser enemies are now lured to your Meteor impact areas. Meteors deals 40-50% increased damage on consecutive hits to the same target. This stacks up to 10 times. – This basically buffs up your Meteor attacks big time and turns this into a mandatory item to use in the Cube. Besides the buffed Meteor Damage, it’s stacking damage which means on Elites and Guardians, this will make Meteors do pretty significant damage.

• Ashnagarr’s Blood Bracer (bracers) – Increases the potency of your shields by 85%. (Wizard Only) [75 – 100]% – There’s really no other option here. But you will be gaining shields to help with your defense.

• Nilfur’s Boast (boots/cube) – Increase the damage of Meteor by 600%. When your Meteor hits 3 or fewer enemies, the damage is increased by 675%. (Wizard Only) [675 – 900]% – Pretty much another mandatory item to further boost your Meteor damage.

• Convention of Elements (ring/cube) – Gain 179% increased damage to a single element for 4 seconds. This non-static effect rotates through the elements available to your class in the following order: Arcane, Cold, Fire, Holy, Lightning, Physical, Poison. [150 – 200]% – A perfectly aligned item for the Tal Rasha set.
• Ring of Royal Grandeur (ring/cube) – Used for doing the hybrid Tal Rasha + Captain Crimson’s Trimmings.

• Halo of Karini (ring/cube) – You take 74% less damage for 5 seconds after your Storm Armor electrocutes an enemy more than 15 yards away. (Wizard Only) [60 – 80]% – Another defensive item that synergizes well with this build.

• The Grand Vizier (staff/cube/weapon slot) – Reduces the Arcane Power cost of Meteor by 50% and increases its damage by 328%. (Wizard Only) [300 – 400]% – I imagine that along with the update to the Smoldering Core, you will be using this to further boost your Meteor damage. But to really take advantage of this weapon, you will be use Meteor as an active skill slot too.

Sanctified Power

For the Sanctified Power, you will want the following power:

Casting Storm Armor sends a power thunderbolt from the skies that instantly kills a random enemy within 30 yards. Bosses are not killed but take significant damage. This effect cannot occur more than once every 60 seconds.

The idea here that you will be using Storm Armor naturally as part of your build. While Storm Armor is a long lasting buff, having this ability turns it into a more active/cooldown skill used to help take down bosses and elites.

Legendary Gems

• Bane of the Trapped – Increased damage all around and some CC.

• Zei’s Stone of Vengeance – You’re mostly going to be doing ranged damage. But the stun from the secondary will also help trigger your Bane of the Trapped damage.
  

• Bane of the Stricken – To help with your single target damage.

Active Skills

• Arcane Torrent: Death Blossom – This will trigger your Arcane damage and cast your Arcane Meteor
• Meteor: Molten Impact – Fire damage trigger and your main source of damage
• Teleport: Wormhole – This is not a fast build so you will need Wormhole for the double teleportation.
• Magic Weapon: Deflection – Provides your shields to work with bracers and
• Storm Armor: Power of the Storm – Your passive lightning (and occasionally active) damage. Also, boost your defense from Halo of Karini along with reducing the cost of your Meteor spell so this is indispensable.
• Blizzard: Frozen Solid – Cold damage as well as a CC to help further trigger your Bane of the Trapped.

Passive Skills

• Elemental Exposure – Pretty much a must have for this build as you are doing all elemental damage and this helps increase it.
• Galvanizing Ward – More shields that augment your Magic Weapon: Deflection buff.
• Audacity – You’re probably going to be dragging enemies towards you with the Smouldering Core and blasting them. So this will allow you to gather them up and increase your damage.
• Illusionist (optional) – Used to speed up your cooldown on Teleport since you really have no other options
• Astral Presence (optional) – In case you find yourself Arcane starved
• Unwavering Will (optional) – Defensive/offensive boost while you’re still for a second or two.

Followers

This build is a resource intensive build because of frequent casting of Meteor, Blizzard and Arcane Torrent so you want to go with a Templar. If you go with the Pauldrons of the Skeleton King, you can skip out on Guardian and pick up Inspire. If you manage to have enough Resource Reduction cost and don’t find yourself out of Arcane power all the time, you probably can just go straight to Mantle of Channeling and use Guardian. Captain Crimson’s Trimmings, a Topaz in the helmet and aiming for resource reduction cost on Shoulders, Gloves and jewelry (rings) should make your build smooth. Also, Astral Presence can help there too.

Final Thoughts

Although I have yet to give this version of the build a try, I’ve always liked Tal Rasha’s but the biggest problems I’ve had in the past were low damage and slowness. I think the boost in damage and focus on Meteors will make this build pretty fun and straight forward. There’s really no “tricks” with this build outside of potentially using Illusionist to reset your cooldown on your Teleport skill. Other than that, I’m eager to see how this build plays out on the PTR.

The post Diablo 3: Patch 2.7.4 PTR Tal Rasha’s Elements Wizard Build appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

So a lot of people are pushing for Tal Rasha 5 piece (6 piece bonus) with a Firebird 3 piece (4 piece bonus) to make use of the damage and defensive boosts from the Firebird set revamp. Thus far, I tried two different skills for these builds and will summarize how I feel about both here.

Energy Twister

This is the most obvious setup. The main four pieces of gear beyond the set pieces are:

• Etched Sigil (for boosting Energy Twister’s damage and auto-casting it through Disintegrate)
• The Twisted Sword (for boosting Energy Twister’s damage, giving The Raging Storm Rune and merging up to 3 other ETs)
• Ranslor’s Folly (grouping up enemies through Energy Twister and increasing Energy Twister’s damage)
• Deathwish (increasing all damage via Disintegrate)
• Hergbrash’s Binding (reducing the cost of Disintegrate)
• Halo of Karini (defense through Storm Armor)
• Ring of Royal Grandeur (of course)
• Convention of Elements

Some people might substitute Ranslor’s Folly with an Ashnagarr’s Blood Bracer to improve your shields. But it’s a pretty big DPS loss as well as losing the ability to group enemies for your Energy Twisters to do the most damage. So I found that setup a little sketchy

For legendary gems, I chose the following:

• Bane of the Trapped
• Bane of the Stricken (for bosses)
• Taeguk

I’ve seen some people use a Zei’s Stone of Vengeance but it’s not very useful in my opinion. Taeguk is far better just because of the Armor bonus through Channeling.

Right now, this is my favorite setup for this build. The bulk of your damage will be done through Energy Twister. Disintegrate is just there to help aut0-cast Energy Twisters and provide Ignite for defense along with lowering the cooldown for Teleport.

You will have Meteor being auto-cast but the effect is mostly a clean up type of situation. You will get at least three different elements in this setup with lightning through your Energy Armor, fire through Disintegrate: Convergence, and Arcane from the Raging Storm rune via Energy Twister.

At the moment, I have Magic Missile: Glacial Spike to trigger a cold effect. However, I think I might end up changing this to Energy Twister because of how the combining effect requires the wizard to cast the spell directly.

My skills are currently setup like this:

• Magic Missile: Glacial Spike (left click, probably will change back to Energy Twister)
• Disintegrate: Convergence (right click for a wider beam)
• Teleport: Wormhole (the cooldown reduction from the set isn’t that great but Safe Passage might be a better option for improved defense at higher difficulties)
• Black Hole: Spellsteal (might change this to Energy Twister and keep Magic Missile where it is since Ranslor’s Folly mostly does something similar)
• Magic Weapon: Deflection (for defense)
• Storm Armor: Power of the Storm (to reduce the cost of abilities)

There is some flexibility in this. Like Storm Armor could switch to Scramble for a little more movement.

For passives, I have the following setup:

• Blur (more defense)
• Elemental Exposure (more damage)
• Galvanizing Ward (more shield defense)
• Conflagration

I might change out Conflagration for Unwavering Will just to get more damage and defense overall. Conflagration sounds good on paper just because it’s fire and goes well with the theme of the Firebird set. But the real name of the game is defense because Firebird isn’t the 6 piece set here.

The build is pretty high damage and quickly ramps up once your Ignite is applied. But the key is that you need to have at least one ignite going for the defense to work. It’s easy to not have any enemies or lose ignites and get wasted.

Fortunately, the Firebird’s 2 set bonus includes a cheat death. So you could have a double cheat death by taking a second one through your follower.

The build itself is pretty slow. Even with a Boon of the Hoarder, I found normal rifts horribly slow especially after playing a GoD Demon Hunter for two seasons straight. The cooldown reduction from the Firebird 4 piece bonus on teleport is pretty mediocre. That’s why I ended up taking the Wormhole rune because there’s no other way to reset the cooldown quick enough.

One thing I did try was the Ashnagarr’s Blood Bracer but honestly thought that the damage reduction from shields was severely lacking. You really just need to keep Ignite up for this build to work. One alternative I’m thinking about is using a Unity for a flat 50% damage reduction. It’ll nuke a lot of my damage from Convention of Elements but I find that damage negligible compared to safety. Either way, I’ll have to play around with it.

Arcane Orb

The second build I tried was an Arcane Orb version. The basic gear isn’t too drastically different from the one above, but there are a few notable differences.

• Unstable Scepter (increase Arcane Orb damage and triggers another explosion)
• Triumvirate (Signature Spells boost Arcane Orb damage)
• Wizard Spike (auto-cast Arcane Orb 25% of the time from attacks)

So in this version, you’re using a cold version of Arcane Orb being auto-cast through Disintegrate and combining that attack with some Signature Spells to stack more damage.You will use the Ashnagarr’s Blood Bracer so you’ll have more defense.

That said, I thought this build was still squishy if not more so as well as chaotic. The damage wasn’t bad but Arcane Orb doesn’t launch frequently enough and does not linger like Energy Twister. Also, you cannot group with Arcane Orb so you’ll need a spell like Blackhole to do this for you.

I found this version to be a bit hectic and less reliable than the Energy Twister version. I didn’t care for needing to keep track somehow of Signature Spells to boost my Arcane Orb’s damage. You probably can trigger your meteor attacks from Tal Rasha’s more easily with all the ways you’re going to be attacking, but it’s just too messy. The auto-grouping with Energy Twister along with the auto-cast from Disintegrate are massive quality of life benefits from the other build.

I’m sure there are other ways for this build. But I think if you are thinking of doing a Tal Rasha version, you’ll most likely end up going with Energy Twister.

Follower Impressions

Thus far, I have only used the tried and true Templar for my Wizard’s follower. It made sense since she was more resource oriented and could use the Templar’s ability to CC enemies. But at the moment, I couldn’t really see a major difference with the revamped abilities. I still am waiting for the cheat death part to come into play. With the Firebird’s 2 piece set bonus though, I think that part won’t be necessary except as a real emergency.

Now, let’s talk about the real fun: gear. So right now, here’s my Templar’s gear setup:

• Avarice Ring
• Ring of Royal Grandeur (YES YOU CAN USE THIS)
• Broken Helmet
• Nemesis Bracers
• Flavor of Time
• Goldskin
• Gladiator Gloves
• Homing Pads
• Sage’s Journey Set (2 pieces but with the 3 piece bonus enabled through the RoRG) via belt and boots
• Storm Shield
• Azurewrath
• Cain’s Set (pants)

I’m probably going to just ditch the RoRG and go with a full Sage set 3 piece and use a different ring (like the Oculus Ring). So for Greater Rifts, the bulk of this gear is useless. The most useful pieces that work in both settings are Nemesis Bracers and the Flavor of Time. Those are excellent additions.

The rest are better farming gear. I have gone heavy with the gold farming gear which is great in normal rifts along with using a Boon of the Hoarder. The Avarice Band along with the Boon of the Hoarder are extremely good because it helps vacuum up gold, health globes and speed up globes.

The Sage’s set, I can see, will be an enormous benefit for Season 23 early on. I’ve been doing T11-13 and the amount of Death Breaths being dropped is incredible. So I can’t wait to use this set once the Season drops.

The gold set really isn’t that great especially when you have a Boon of the Hoarder already at level 50. It might be better early on when you aren’t leveling a Boon of the Hoarder. Also, the other use case would be XP farming in T16 with Custerian Wristguards. But in that situation you would be sacrificing Nemesis Bracers for those.

The Broken Helm at the moment doesn’t feel like much. I’m sure with Gem Goblins, the helmet will make a difference. However, most of the gems I’ve found seem like random drops still. So not sure if it’s me or there’s an actual bug.

Homing Pads are great QoL for normal rifts. These will be great in rifts where you speed through and still haven’t cleaned up. Or in Adventure Mode where you have some annoying leftovers. I feel these will serve quite well early on.

I did try applying the Asheara’s Set to my follower just to see if the Templar could trigger summoning the other two. Alas, he could not but I hope this situation will change in the future with an update to the set.

Of course, if they update the Asheara’s set to allow for two more followers in some capacity, they would need to add more items to make them useful. It’s clear that Followers are mostly utilitarian at the moment. But their gear is mostly worthless in Greater Rifts and it’s a discrepancy I hope that will change in a future iteration.

I didn’t try out the Cain’s set, which provides the extra Greater Rift key yet. I crafted a few pieces but realized that the use case for this set is fresh Seasons and late game for those who fish for perfect rifts. Since the XP bonus from this set is not Emanated, it’s not that useful for players who aren’t GR fishing.

I still need to check out the other two followers. I think one great thing about the expanded gear is that you have more room for mules. You cannot use class specific gear on them though. The game prohibited me from doing that.

Also, I noticed that the Armory won’t allow me to save Follower sets. So you will need to swap gear manually between Greater and Normal rifts.

Tomorrow, I might give the PTR another shot. I might ditch the Tal Rasha aspect of the build and just try a straight Firebird build. I feel that you’re just losing too much in trying to shove all that gear into a hybrid build. It’s a fun concept but I can feel the squishiness from giving up a ring slot to the RoRG. I don’t think Tal Rasha’s 4 piece defensive bonus is that great either. The meteors are cool but really aren’t that great if your goal is trying to proc each element.

The other thing I want to try is the ravamped Rathma set. I did have a Necromancer with the basic gear but I need to figure out how to make this build work. It’s been a long time since I played this build and I’m not sure how it’ll work with the changes.

Lastly, I might even give a Witch Doctor a go. I’m not that motivated to try the newest set since it too got nerfed. But it’s the one set I have yet to goof around on since they were introduced.

The post Diablo 3: PTR Patch 2.7 Season 23 Initial Testing With Wizard Tal Rasha + Firebird Revamp appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

What is this Del-Rasha build people are raving about? I mentioned it in a previous post but I wanted to go into detail here. This blog goes into the general gear and ideas for doing a reasonable version of this build.

Del-Rasha is a hybrid build that combines 3 pieces from the Delsere’s Magnum Opus Wizard/Slow Time set with 5 pieces of the Tal Rasha’s Elements set. The key to this build is the Kanai’s Cube where you can use a Ring of Royal Grandeur to allow for the mixing of both sets along with being able to still use Focus/Restraint and a few other items for some nice damage output. You will still be doing meteor damage through using a variety of elemental attacks that trigger your meteors. In that manner, you still will want to use [d3]Nilfurs Boast[/d3] for the increase in meteor damage.

Other key items in this build are the [d3]Gesture of Orpheus[/d3] to reduce your Slow Time cooldown, [d3]Crown of the Primus[/d3] for supplying your Slow Time with all runes and Reaper’s Wraps for a little bit of resource recuperation. For infinite teleport, you will want to use an [d3]Aether Walker[/d3], which will be your only arcane spender. Having both ensures that you can port around almost indefinitely.

In order to get Del-Rasha to work together, you are required to use the off-hand, amulet and belt from Tal-Rahsa’s set so that you can make room for the Delsere’s set. The only item that becomes a must-have for Delsere’s is [d3]Dashing Pauldrons of Despair[/d3] for the shoulders (since there are no Tal Rasha shoulder pieces).

Your main focus for this build in terms of gear stats is cooldown reduction. Most of your abilities will be cooldown intensive and you will want to ensure that Slow Time is up constantly. You can have some level of resource reduction just for Teleport, but it isn’t nearly as important.

For your legendary gems, you will want Bane of the Trapped, which works nicely with Slow Time and Black Hole, Zei’s Stone of Vengeance, for a little more CC and ranged damage boost and Molten Wildebeest’s Gizzard for shielding and life regeneration.

Your active skills will be Shock Pulse: Piercing Orb, which helps lower the cooldown on your Slow Time, Slow Time: Time Warp (although the rune won’t matter due to the Crown of the Primus providing all runes), Teleport: Calamity for Arcane damage, Mirror Image: Duplicates as a defensive cooldown and as a mechanism to toss out more black holes and slow time spells, Magic Weapon: Ignite to help trigger the fire aspect of Tal Rasha’s and finally Black Hole: Absolute Zero to trigger the cold aspect.

For passives, you will go with Elemental Exposure, as this is a must-have for Tal Rasha’s, Arcane Dynamo for some boost in damage that works in conjunction with your Shock Pulse, Evocation for more cooldown reduction and of course Illusionist to trigger Mirror Images, Slow Time and Teleport (mostly Mirror Images) by taking 15% damage.

The way you play this build is teleport around and drop Slow Time bubbles around you. Use Shock Pulse to trigger both the lightning meteors as well as bringing down the cooldown of Slow Time. Generally, with my cooldown reduction I can get Slow Time to roughly 2 shots for every Shock Pulse. You want to get a little in the face of your enemies to take some damage when Mirror Image is on cooldown. If your Slow Time is on cooldown too, you can drop a Black Hole to further slow enemies then fire off a few Shock Pulses to plop another Slow Time bubble right above them.

I find this build to be the best wizard farming build due to the near infinite level of teleport. You should conserve your teleports for the most part and kill groups while hunting for Health Globes to regenerate your arcane power. If you find yourself resource starved, you could toss out Arcane Dynamo for Astral Presence since it increases your total arcane power and regeneration.

The thing I really like about this build is the raw speed. It’s not a hard build to gear, imo, and can still do a fair amount of damage. But I feel that speed is the key to efficiency in this game and it allows you to bypass mobs or areas that normally would hinder a higher damaging but slower build.

The post Diablo 3: Wizard Del-Rasha Build for Patch 2.3 appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.