On the Meteor build everyone seems to have Arcane, any reason why?
A fully charged Star Pact hits for about 4x the impact damage of a Comet.
Meteor does 740% weapon damage baseline for the impact.
Star Pact gets another 20% weapon damage per Arcane Power spent above the base AP cost of a meteor cast. (the DoT portion is not affected by the extra damage bonus from Star Pact, but most of the damage is from the impact anyway).
So with just the basic 125 Arcane Power, 10% RCR from paragon and 50% meteor RCR from Grand Vizier, a fully charged Star Pact does 740+(125-40*0.9*0.5)*20 = 2880% weapon damage.
That’s almost 4x the damage!
Now in practice, not all your Star Pacts will be fully charged, and you can’t spam them out as frequently as you can with Comet, so you aren’t always going to see 4x dps with Star Pact.
But between the APoC and Empowered Shrine from the season theme, it’s a lot easier this season to spam out Star Pacts.
And here’s the thing: even a bare minimum AP Star Pact (i.e. when you have just enough AP to cast it) still does the 740% baseline weapon damage. A non-charged Star Pact is still equal to a Comet, and for every little bit of extra AP you have over the base cost, Star Pact becomes stronger.
So the worst case scenario (e.g. vs. a single target RG), Star Pact still does the same damage as Comet.
Comet has a couple advantages, e.g. the slows/freezes help a bit with defense and it triggers Bane of the Trapped more consistently on every enemy. On the other hand, Comet also seems to be laggier.
Star Pact just does way more damage though, particularly this season with the ease of getting your arcane power back. And more damage (almost) always wins.
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I yesterday gave Star Pact a try - according to maxroll guides since I am no expert on wizz. I have fully augmented gear (about 20,1k INT) and ~1150 paragons. To play SP I needed to reroll cold% to arcane% and adjust build (passives + runes). I run speedy gr 130.
With comet I had almost 100% uptime on squirts and did 10 runs with no deaths. My shields were so powerful that almost never dropped. I use Deflection on Magic Weapon and Galvanizing Ward + Dominance passives. I also play without Esoteric Alteration.
When I swapped to SP, at least according to maxroll, I had to swap Deflection and Dominance for Astral Presence and Conduit. SP indeed hit for more damage but I lost my shields and thus 100% squirts uptime and I had problems staying alive, which I solved with Esoteric Alteration.
So for me the change comet → SP gave me 4x dmg for the loss of Squirts and 1 offensive gem.
Am I doing something wrong? What passives do you use with SP? Is there a way to compromise the shielding with AP generation?
I use galvanizing ward, dominance, audacity and enlemental exposure with SP. If your shields break often you should get more defense from your gears and move some paragon points to vitality. The usual balance point is that your overal sheet toughness is 10x of your sheet damage. But we can usually dial it down a bit because we dodge most of the high damages in the game. Since wiz can now cast meteors continuously teleport refreshes quickly, which really helps and should not be wasted.