I always had trouble DB Farming with Wizard in T16.
I guess the Vyr build with Messerchmidt Reaver can do it now, so I am probably late to the party…
But anyway here is an alternative, an easy T16 Wizard build, with sage set and Aether Walker using the DMO set (so a tad slow, I will agree, you have to put down those slow time bubble).
https://www.d3planner.com/273180970
Strategy and build:
The build has both cool down reduction and cost reduction and arcane power on crit… Because the goal is to spam 3 expensive skills: slow time, arcane orb and teleport. (prodigy might be superfluous, arcane on crit does wonder)
other than that, teleport around, make a bubble, fire shock pulse a few time (for the Trimuvirate bonus), then hold arcane orb, bob is your uncle!
I am using Ancient Parthan Defender instead of Nemesis because I had toughness issue, but with Slow Time Exhaustion and Parthan Defender it’s cake walk.
Arcane Orb need be Obliteration for the explosion (Unstable Specter) damage bonus
Tal’s is just a better farming set compared to Delsere’s. The bubble mechanics really slow Delsere’s down. Tal’s has it’s own problems, but it’s still faster than Delsere’s.
I have the fire skill as Black Hole: Blazar, but it can really be whatever.
And if you are running Sage’s, you should figure out how to stay alive while using Nemesis bracers. Running Sage’s but no Nem’s seems a bit silly. You can switch passives to do that, e.g. in your setup you have Prodigy. You don’t need that since you have Shame of Delsere. You could run Galvanizing Ward there instead.
No it doesn’t. Every rune benefits from the Unstable Scepter damage bonus. The entirety of the rune benefits from the damage bonus (up 450%), so the ice shards for Frozen Orb for example. And then the explosion part happens twice. So it tends to be a little better for the runes that have more of the damage baked into the explosion part, so it’s bad with Scorch but pretty good with everything else.
You’re right that the double explosion part is a little better with Obliteration. But the AoE is so small that’s just really not a very good rune for speedfarming. And Frozen Orb actually does more damage than the rune description makes it appear. There’s three parts to Frozen Orb damage: the ice shards (big area), what it actually passes through (smaller area), and the explosion itself. If you manage to hit an enemy with all three of those components, it does significantly more damage than the tooltip suggests. Properly aimed Frozen Orb does almost double the damage of Obliteration. So between the higher base weapon damage and significantly better AoE, it’s really the way to go.
Yeah Delsere is kind of slow… I didn’t try Tal arcane orb, might play a bit more Diablo and try it out, sound interesting…
(I was kind of done with the season haha)
True and false!
True the explosion bonus always apply.
But with cold and fire the explosion is at the end of the path, whereas, with Obliteration, it explodes as soon as it hits something, which is what I wanted, kill mob around me first!
later that day…
ok I just tried…
Even try to teleport at the right distance for explosion damage bonus… But enemy keep moving towards me and don’t stay at the right distance (so damage is quite noticeably lower)… Or maybe this is just me not having the play style right?! dunno
And also, one strange thing, I am running out of mana so fast compare to my build
At any rate I prefer my build…
Anyway, compared to a Vyr build with Messerchmidt, it is plainfully slow indeed…
With Tal’s you mean? Yeah, the Tal’s build is much more Arcane Power-hungry since you don’t have Wormhole. You spend twice as much Arcane Power teleporting, it adds up. You need to take some resource cost reduction (topaz in helm, RCR on shoulders and maybe another slot). And you want to stutter generator casts in with your teleport. So you kind of teleport then cast a generator, teleport then cast a generator, and toss out orbs when there are enemies around. Astral Presence helps too.
Yeah, I don’t really bother with Sage’s anymore. There was a time for it, but so many DBs drop now that they added T16 that you don’t really need it. DBs aren’t really the limiting factor anymore, in the long term you’ll tend to be more limited by regular white/blue/yellow mats. Unless you run a crap-ton of bounties, anyway (bounty caches are an excellent source of regular white/blue/yellow mats). If all you do is run T16 rifts and GRs, you’ll be limited by white mats, not by DBs. The extra DBs from Sage’s don’t really seem worth it anymore. Might as well just forego Sage’s and focus on clearing the rifts faster.
I am using safe passage with my build. But with my build I can spam ArcaneOrb as long as I hit enemies. I think it’s the “Magic Weapon-Conduit rune” perhaps…
Well… that’s funny… I always struggled with DB… until 2 days ago, just a few hours of play with sage and I shot 2000 DBs!
Too bad I got almost all ancient and mostly done for this season of Diablo!
While not the most efficient build anymore, explosive blast is a really fun sage build: 5 pieces tal, 2 sage, 2 aughild, ingeom, ooid, f&r or soj+avarice if your damage is enough. Cube: woh, nemesis, rorg.
If sage isn’t your thing, you can wear crimson instead which really helps since both cdr and rcr are crucial to the build. With sage build I easily speedrun T16 at p1700, with crimson up to gr85 but then it’s hard to chain kill elites even with f&r.
If you don’t need the supportive sets you can always add speed (krelm belt, warz bracers, wreath etc).
I have seen people playing Explosive Balst for many season already… and tried a few times…
I dunno how they do it, doesn’t work for me…
Maybe I am too old to get away in time when in a bad spot? (life tend to go down fast when it does…)
At any rate I did give it a go and also I found that it didn’t do that much damage (to be fair I didn’t have cooldown of 0 thanks to InGeom, but zodiac was bringing down the coolddown fast too since the faster you spam the more cooldown you have! ^^)
It really is a lazy build, you num-lock everything and just rund around. In-geom is an integral part since EB, diamond skin and teleport reset instantly. Zodiac is not the optimal way to play since so many skills are on cooldown and need procs.
Your skills should be tele/calamity, diamond skin/prism, EB/chain reaction, electrocute/surge, frost nova/frozen mist, MW/deflection. In no way am I implying that it’s the strongest farming build out there. But it really is the laziest for T16 rifts, you simply walk around and tele from elite to elite, far better than reseting archon or keeping triumvirate stacks in terms of laziness.
