Relying on Life-per-hit as a wizard feels like a mistake. We have galvanic force fields instead of healing. If you can’t reroll the life-per-hit into something offense-oriented, and if the total INT after augmenting doesn’t overwhelm the normal one’s physical damage boost, then maybe stick with the normal one.
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My question to some math fanatics - I have 2 CoE’s. Both have socket, CHC, CHD, AD. One is ancient with 150% modifier. Second is non-ancient with 194%.
What is better for me? It is either 750 INT from augment or 44% damage on cold cycle?!
Remember, it’s not 44%, it’s 44 percentage points. The 194 hits ~17.6% harder 1/4 of the time. The 750 INT, if applied consistently all the time, is worth about the same on average if your total INT is around 17-18k.
So as you go past 17k INT and get better at timing your attacks, the 194 continues to get better. If you’re just not good at hitting at the right time in the Convention cycle, then the ancient ring will hold value longer.
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Not maybe, if you ask me…
Reasoning:
- the normal ring has max DR, can’t wish for more
- dps gained from damage range won’t diminish when adding more INT (paragon). The extra dps coming from +INT on an ancient ring will - slowly but surely - loose a bit of its worth the more INT is gained from paragon.
Though, the damage range affix is not as powerful when using a two-handed weapon (staff). But I’d still choose the normal ring.
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Damage and Life on hit and quite marginal for this build and season. Bigger difference is the 79% vs 80% (5% more damage taken), vs the higher int and augment. You’re relatively low paragon, so I think the augment will be worth more for you. Will probably get most if not all of the 5% lost toughness from the orange roll back, and it’ll be more damage.
Higher orange roll, even if you’re not playing around it, as minus said. You are 2k paragon and have mostly ancients, so you’d have like 20k main stat.
Looking at your profile you have an ancient squirts with crit damage, low area damage and int. I think a non-ancient with crit damage and crit chance would be a big damage upgrade if you have one. Not that hard to find, and I’d expect you to have found one by now.
I will definitely do this since I already dropped ancient squirts with double crit and int.
How much AD is acceptable? Right now I have 100% and I am going to drop 12% from Squirts. I should be able to replace my gloves with AD ones and get better shoulders. With those changes I would end up with 114% AD. If I equip CoE I would have about 130% AD. Is that okay?
AD is never best in slot on amulet, but for star pact pushing or slow XP you want it on all other slots. Shoulders are easy 20% AD (reroll until you get int/vit/AD and last can be armour % life, RCR), ancient gloves are doable trifecta crit/crit/AD/int. Coe and in particular karini are hard to find AD, as crit/crit has higher priority, so dont worry if you run with int/crit/crit on rings until you find trifectas with good orange rolls. Weapon with % damage, AD, int should be doable. A few of the AD roll go to attack speed if you play cold 3-4min XP runs, so keep gloves, weapon and rings with attack speed for that.
OK - here is another Q: Dominance or Galvanizing Ward instead of Unstable Anomaly?
I trigger UA about 2-3 times per rift when I’m above GR130 or so. I currently am NOT running Squirts, but to push I know I have no choice but to switch to the Aughilds/squirts build. Which one gives more consistent Squirts stacks overall during pushing? (Please note- my play style is SMASH MOAR BUTTONS and if I do a straight swap in D3 Planner to that gear then it looks like I need to maintain 3 stacks minimum of Squirts to not lose a lot of damage)
You’re using Star Pact. You want both Galvanizing Ward and Dominance. Maybe get rid of Elemental Exposure too for now.
Also, craft yourself some new bracers with Vitality instead of Life-on-hit. Is your staff a self-made primal? Maybe craft a new one of those with something other than Life-on-hit. You’re super light on VIT, missing it on the bracers, pants, and boots, so you might make do for now with an extra 1400-ish VIT on your weapon.
Galvanising ward, power hungry and elemental exposure are mandatory.
For last one, dominance is great for speed runs (below 5mins or so), but if you are aiming for your first GR150 at just below to 15 minutes, then it doesn’t have much value any longer. Blur is the best defensive option, you have a cheat death from your follower already, and blur makes your shield stronger, giving you more squirts uptime.
You probably need to adjust your playstyle. You need to stay at range, casting meteors at the edge of your screen, and be constantly moving. ie, don’t stand 5 seconds in a desecrator pool holding down meteor. And when pushing, important to not play bad rifts, ie closed maps like spaghetti, keep or corvus, etc, or rifts with mobtypes that kill you, like spear throwers, ghosts, lacuni huntress, licking frogs, etc. Just go straight back up, close the rift, and open a better one!
Quit watching my screen!!!
If you die a lot, then swapping into cold might allow you to push easier. As you are about to swap out your amulet and bracers anyway (the two slots with elemental damage), I’d try cold as you go to aughilds/squirts. It’s a little less maximum damage potential, but you’re taking much less damage as you get a sustain shield from magic weapon deflection that helps protect and reset galvanising ward, and you cc mobs so they’ll be attacking you less. So with that it might be more effective damage through squirts uptime.
looking at your gear, I see that you run with a rorg equipped, and that attack speed will play into cold more than arcane. And as you don’t have crit/crit/AD trifecta gloves, maybe you have crit/crit/ias gloves? Either way I’d roll the AD to CHD on your gloves you have. AD is important when pushing, but crit/crit almost always has priority, and you are already missing crit damage on both rings, so you really can’t afford missing it on gloves as well.
Other small things on your gear: roll armour to vit on your pants. Ideally you get int/vit/armour pants, but as you’re stuck with an all resist roll for now, int and vit are the two important ones. Probably some pants gambling to do after you sorted the gloves situation.
Nice chest piece, but the secondary shouldn’t be life on globes, you want reduced damage from ranged (or melee maybe?).
And in particularly if you stay on arcane I think it’s worth to spend some bounty mats, if you have them collecting dust in your mats tab, to roll a coe to replace the ancient (but unaugmented) int/crit/ias rorg. Rings with orange range are usually tricky (just look at your other hand), but coe always rolls with crit chance and orange range isn’t THAT crusial for tal (as you deal damage out of cycle as well), so an int/crit/crit with ~190% orange roll shouldn’t be that hard to get, probably like 50-100 bounty mats would have a fair chance to get you a significant damage upgrade?
And ditch Guardians. You’re almost 1700 paragons so should be on aughilds now.
Would love to, but after crafting a little over 100 Aughilds bracers and reforging squirts ~50-70 times (and running out of FS soooo many times!) the best I have in both of those drops my damage by around 10%-15% or so, according to D3 planner - and that is if I can keep 8-10 stacks of Squirts up at ALL TIMES. I have gotten HORRIBLE RNG this season.
As for the AD to CHD, I will try that. Also, if I swap the magic weapon to deflection do I have to tweak anything else to gain the survivability? Of course, until I go Squirts shields don’t matter as much, but I know if/when I do finally get decent gear I need to do that swap.
---- Oh, and please note- this does NOT mean I will stop trying to forge better gear, just why I haven’t made the switch yet. Tried a few times so far with what I have and… bad. Just bad.
You are not alone with that.
Same for me, but in a different way. I want primal Tal Rasha items, but to no avail. Where the heck are they? Meanwhile I got the full Typhon set and 3 or 4 items of DMO, Firebird and Vyr as primals. Some of Firebird and Typhon even twice. Tal Rasha? Ohoho… I got a primal Tal source, a nicely rolled one even. This is odd. Just like the game is dissing me. Same for staves. In every other season I got primal staves like as if they grow on trees. Crap one like broken staff, but anyways. This time? None… staves don’t even drop. It’s weird. So I upgrade rares and I use all my mats to reforge SC and the best I got was the one I’m using. And that one is pretty meh at best.
Meanwhile I found, be impressed: Fragment of Destiny, Sparker, Twisted Sword, Unstable Scepter, Triumvirate, Depth Diggers and some more. Ouch, I don’t even play those this season. Not a bit. And most rolled so well, don’t even need to enchant them. I mean, I’m happy, they will be great in NS, but the ones I really want this season are nowhere to be found.
Funny thing is, I see few primals coming from GRs. I get most of them from either Kadala or through random stuff while farming keys in normal rifts. But I’m not complaining. Well, at the very least, I got GR 150 down and now I’m leveling tons of gems to 150 to transfer them to NS.
Count-wise you have me beat for primals this season with these, but I got a Haunt of Vaxo (vexo? meh, whatever) and a Messofscmidts as well as fire walkers and the mud ones? Top that for useless build of the century! Other than those, no primals yet.
Gibbe pl0x!
Meanwhile I found (well rolled) primal vizier and smouldering, but no fragments or sparkers, but I’ve been pushing hydra more than meteor. Similarly I found an essentially primal ancient arcane squirts, but only crappy cold squirts. 
I shouldn’t complain though, I’ve been playing meteor in group lots (and a bit solo XP as well) so I’ve put them to good use. 
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Serves you right for stealing my staves
Now, seriously… I might try some Hydra farming to see if that makes the game think I want Hydra items and then hand me staves. But given what happened so far, I will get a primal Valthek to annoy me even more.
Oh, had a quadruple primal drop today. Man, call me lucky… ergh, pardon, … slight correction. 220 ashes dropped (some useless axe, amulet, shoulder and gloves). But guess what, while those trash primals dropped, there was a normal Vizier and three normal Tal Rasha items in that very same drop as well 
But yeah, at least I can use the ashes on the next Puzzle Rings, so they are not completely worthless anymore 
And even if I sound ungrateful - far from it. I think I do have some very nice items this season, so I really can’t complain. I enjoy this season quite a bit, and I will put the time to good use.
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One thing that I still need to do is becoming better at beating GR150. I can do GR 146/147 just fine, even if I get bad maps like Keeps or caves… but I still struggle a bit on GR149-150. So my goal for this season has been set on beating pretty much any GR150 the game throws at me. Given how limited my time to play actually is these days, that might prove difficult, since I need a lot more paragons now. And up all my augments from 125 to 150. That equals 300 paragon ranks (1500 INT). And obviously a better weapon. If I had my current SC as a primal then that alone could add ~18% overall damage.
Slowly but surely… and the season will still continue for a while, so there’s a lot of time left to get all that done.
Last night while running a group 149, primal boots dropped for me… and they were the right ones for Tal! Nilfur’s Boast, just needs Meteor rolled on as a Primary and I can start being more fashionable! YES!!!
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For me, I decided to get all my augments up to 150 (12 items) and then focus on 150s. I did my first 150 at p1560ish with 125s everywhere but my main gems were 149. I just slowly pushed up one GR at a time, levelling my main gems so they kept pace with me.
I did 149’s to get my 150 main gems, then dropped back to bring 12 x 125s slowly up to 150. Once fully augmented with 150s (around p2200) I then only did 150s and I managed to complete every single one. The worst maps by only a few seconds though!!
All my game play was SSF except public bounties. GL with your future plans!