These builds were made to be as powerful as possible and as simple to use as possible. This includes 3 versions, one each for greater rifts and farming/everything-else and a starter “delsere’s magnum opus” option.
First, the skills and how to use them are easy. This is from console version perspective but easy to do on the PC also.
- You always have to start up Storm Armor and Familiar right away. The DMO version will also need to use Slow Time often enough to keep defenses up and on step 3 to be able to do much damage at all.
- Hold down(spam or numlock trick or whatever) the buttons for Diamond Skin and Explosive Blast/Flash constantly, looking for big groups and/or elites to park next to.
- Park next to a lot of enemies/elites then start holding down Arcane Torrent and watch everything melt.
- Continue constant Diamond Skin and Explosive Blast/Flash at all times and look for your next victims.
For the main builds, Magic Weapon/Deflection is recommended for the 6th slot. It doesn’t interfere with combat and helps with Diamond Skin to keep you alive and the “squirt’s necklace” buff up. Magic Weapon is the one skill that can be sacrificed for space for Slow Time on the bar for the DMO starter build.
Greater rift build: https://www.d3planner.com/684060018
Farming/everything else build: https://www.d3planner.com/748979931
Starter DMO build: https://www.d3planner.com/299254292
I intentionally left those builds without any paragon in the unlimited intelligence and vitality slots; that shows them at their weakest. The DMO build was left with non-ancient gear also for that reason. This shows you what you can start with and get better. You can even toggle the Legacy of Dreams builds to all “normal” non-ancient gear to see where they would start also. They’re strong either way.
There are 6 simple absolute necessities to make these builds work:
- minimum 66.9% cooldown, requiring a worn or cubed Leoric’s Crown and paragon points with cooldown affixes nearly maxed; only allows a total of 3 points below max spread among all cooldown affixes on items, like the 10% on the weapon dropping to 7% or that 8% and another 8% affix dropping to 7% on something else
- minimum 17.2% cost reduction, includes paragon and 1 item with 8% resource cost reduction, which is actually easy as you’ll see
- a “Hergbrash’s Binding” belt either worn or cubed for 65% reduction
- Storm Armor/Power of the Storm rune and Familiar/Arcanot rune are absolutely required for the cost reduction and regen; the build won’t be sustainable without them
- Avoid attack speed entirely, except the paragon 10% buff. That is just what you need to make “etched sigil” work perfectly and anything more will break it.
- You need the secondary “max arcane power” on the wand and source and in paragon to keep “aquila’s cuirass” buff up in the greater rift build; this is not optional as you will drop below 90% otherwise.
The above are really all it takes and the rest is completely open to changes, aside from some things being pretty obviously the best choices. I do recommend the options I have chosen in the saved builds already as what I believe is best to do as much damage without being too risky survivability but will list what replacements I am considering here, depending on the performance of these builds.
The legendary gems, other than Legacy of Dreams or possibly Invigorating Gemstone and the Boon of the Hoarder(for “goldwrap”), are all up to you. I recommend Bane of the Stricken, at least for the greater rift build, as this build will be attacking with very many hits very quickly so should ramp up fast; this quickly outpaces Bane of the Powerful.
Enchanter re-rolls required:
- “obisidian ring of the zodiac” will need attack speed re-rolled to a socket. You don’t want attack speed anyway.
- “unity”/“avarice band” will need to re-roll intelligence to either cooldown or a socket or whatever else is missing from the d3planner links.
- “xephirian amulet” will need attack speed re-rolled to whatever is needed from the planner links that it may be missing.
- “kymbo’s gold” will need intelligence re-rolled for better options as in the planner.
- “goldskin” needs the all resistance swapped to whatever yours is missing from the planner link.
Possible swaps:
- You can swap the rune for Arcane Torrent from Static Discharge to Flame Ward for more defense but less damage and possibly less “obisidian ring” procs.
- The “xephirian amulet” can be replaced with “squirt’s necklace” if you want to use the cube jewelry slot for something else. This will leave you vulnerable to electrified monsters and especially to reflectors, which can seriously hurt with the damage these builds do.
- If you do swap number 1 here then the “convention of elements” is a good cube choice which only helps 25% of the time but you can try to work around it if you want.
- You can swap “unity” for “halo of karini”, but the increased elite damage from “unity” and more reliable defense buff makes it the better choice. You could use “halo of karini” in the cube if you swapped the necklace like above.
- If you need more initial survivability on the farming version then you can swap out “avarice band” for “unity” or “halo of karini”. This actually may end up better over the long term also as it would stagger your gold intake with your pet picking it up slower than you and prolong your increased defenses.
- The “custerian wristguards” can be swapped for “ashnagarr’s blood bracer” for better defensive shields for the farming build, but the extra experience isn’t bad and the doubled shields may not be necessary.
- You could swap “stone gauntlets” for “gloves of worship”, especially if you haven’t got the stone gauntlets from a barbarian/crusader alt, but the “stone gauntlets” are better more constant defense and immobilize enemies inside your AoE. That does require the “invigorating gemstone” to avoid the downsides to those gauntlets though. This may be a good swap also if you find enemies often immobilized outside your Explosive Blast range.
- Galvanizing Ward is recommended for the start of greater rifts and anywhere else you won’t be hitting enemies to recharge Diamond Skin as fast, but you could swap it for Unstable Anomaly or maybe Unwavering Will/Glass Cannon or Conflagration if you use Flame Ward from above.
Diamond Skin can be any rune you want, but I recommend against the Prism rune as that would break the procs from “obsidian ring of the zodiac” that keeps Diamond Skin ready as much as possible. Diamond Skin can’t be permanent without those procs and that’s if it doesn’t drop due to damage also. I recommend the Crystal Shell rune for the larger shield to keep it from dropping so easily.
You can use this build with another rune of Explosive Blast other than Flash, but you will sacrifice damage per second if you do. Flash is the best rune by far because halving the cooldown makes it fit perfectly with the “etched sigil” free cast every second without wasting any of them and half cooldown means double damage versus other runes. Even the Chain Reaction rune is weaker, unless cooldown was eliminated so that attack speed was the only limit.
Yes, I have tried making versions using other Explosive Blast runes and nothing remotely compares unless relying on the unreliable In-geom with its short duration AFTER defeating elites, which also makes it require different gearing for resource cost which makes it less damage and/or defense. It’s better to have a build always at 100%, in my opinion.
I chose not to have any other cooldown dependent abilities to avoid the “obsidian ring” procs going to them and avoided other attacks for the same reason of avoiding wasting “etched sigil” casts.
A similar build to this was just recently posted to Youtube by Cratic1321 using the S20 PTR options, but his used Chain Reaction and In-geom for the above reasons while my build works even non-season. His video and linked build page in description is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OXCKPAVJtc
He assigned more paragon to intelligence and vitality and seems to always augment his gear. It looks amazingly fun either way.
I felt I had to post my builds once I saw his video up as a comparison for those of us just wanting an easier option, or possibly better.
Edit:
Still working on Energy Twister based builds, mainly for console where they don’t interrupt channeling. The above Explosive Blast builds are easier to build for though and easier to play across all versions, even if Energy Twister has higher damage potential.
Edit 2:
FYI, the builds do not show all the DPS total. They don’t count the “etched sigil” free casts. So the DPS listed on Explosive Blast is almost double that. This also doesn’t do nearly as much DPS when not channeling, which is around 90 billion; that’s clearly far below the 1 trillion if you just channel and 2 trillion if you simul-cast Explosive Blast.
I really wish Explosive Blast could be that good without “deathwish” and “etched sigil”, but we have what we have and it is at least the easiest option of all the channeling ones, if you ask me.
Edit 3:
Putting “squirt’s necklace” in the gear slot with lightning damage, crit chance and crit damage on either above Legacy of Dreams build and “convention of elements” in the jewelry cube slot ends up doing 7 trillion DPS on convention rotation, not including elite damage bonus or whatever gem you choose for the greater rift build there.
That’s nice. 
Any opinions on this? Anybody tried this build or something similar after seeing this?
Edit 4:
Another build by Cratic1321 on youtube based on this same idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtrB38LUHLo&t=127s
I’m glad to see I’m not the only 1 and it isn’t bad for doing greater rifts with it. For some reason, that video of his stops a lot and never makes it past a certain point for me; seems the video may be corrupted/broken.