LOD vs Reverse Archon Query

General Discussion
1

Any archon Wizards here that can share their thoughts on reverse archon vs LOD vs Tal?

Also, how do you play reverse archon? I’ve already done 150s with Tal and LOD but have never played archon before so don’t understand how it works and skill rotations for it?

Thank you.

2

If you mean the Archon LoD meteors, it’s quite nice build - mobile and high dmg. Note that it’s a counter archon build (archon mode creates dmg for non-archon time).

  • Activate magic weapon + storm shield + go to archon. You can pull mobs and position yourself in the archon mode - you don’t do any dmg during this 20 sec but just get the archon stacks for the 20 sec after the archon. Be sure not to lose your shields during the archon.
  • When archon is going to stop, find yourself a safe spot where you don’t take much incoming dmg.
  • Immediately when archon stops do following things
    • Activate explosive blast. When it explodes, be near at least one mob.
    • Black hole to biggest mobs group. You can also use this for defense if there are nearby ranged mobs.
    • Start shooting meteors, for dmg and more shields
  • When you have 3-4 OID stacks from explosive blast, you can quite freely stand in most places and kill the grouped mobs
  • When your archon stacks stop, shoot the last meteors to some nice place and activate archon again - you could optionally try getting double archon stacks for those last ones or then time by your coe cycle.
  • Repeat until finished (and you get the easiest solo 150 of this season)
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3

Do you think this is more powerful than Tal or standard LOD?

Also what is the arcane (?) beam I see them shooting?

Cheers

4

I am planning on making Wizard my main push class this season and was considering this build as well so thanks for the instructions.

Now I need to not salvage OID’s without inspecting them first.

5

This build is much more powerful than Tal, but has 20sec downtime which affects really fast runs. Regular LOD is harder to compare: peak damage is higher with counter archon, but regular LOD can shoot about 2x more time. In those crazy 1min 20 sec runs you only have 2 cycles.

Arcane beam has 3 functions coming to my mind

  • Get mobs angrier to follow you faster
  • Magic weapon deflection gives you more shield (strike gives them faster, but is melee)
  • It gives stricken stacks (same point about strike)

Note that you can use archon blast same time as beam or strike to optimize shields / stricken stacks.

6

There’s an ICD on the Deflection stacks. Using blast shortly after strike/beam will (usually) not grant you a Deflection stack since you’re still within the ICD window from the last strike/beam tick.

There’s no real benefit to spamming Blast while also using strike/beam.

Only real benefit is it can give you a Deflection stack while you are actively moving (and so not actively casting strike/beam).

This is easy to confirm with Deflection. The same should be true for Stricken I think as it also has an ICD, but I’ve never tested this with spamming blast.

Spamming Blast is more just a Vyr’s thing, since it does give you an extra Vyr’s stack.

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7

While I have never actually tested, I remembered the ICDs being based on channeling skill coefficients or whatever, being slower than other skills.
With Vyr I have at least convinced myself that strike gives stacks faster than beam - and thought same applies to stricken + deflection.

8

What are your thoughts on CDR? I see the recommendations is to run cooldown everywhere but the number 3 player I think it is, is running only one slot with cooldown in it?

9

I don’t know if it’s possible to get any real benefits of faster cooldown on the archon build on the record runs. One would need to get more COE bonuses or something to get any more dmg, and I think it’s not possible.

With one roll I can manage the cooldown in most places.
Top players might actually not care about the “wasted” extra cooldowns, since build is tanky in any case and cooldown gives mobility if you happen to run out of mobs to shoot (and proccing Zodiac) - which often happens on worse 150 runs and lower levels.

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