I have mostly been playing Monk, but I am starting to play with the Wiz. WHY is this the Ethereal of choice on the leaderboards? With the firebird build, it is the mirror images that do the damages, so the attack speed has no value, the AR has minimal use, and the only thing of value is the CDR. Please help me understand…
The stacking damage bonus. For a build like Firebird’s that doesn’t run Stricken, this is extremely valuable vs. the Rift Guardian. Wizardspike does double damage to the RG (and anything else you manage to stack it on).
The Oculus has about 20-25% higher base DPS. That’s actually pretty meaningful with Firebird’s Mirror Images, which as you’ve noted doesn’t scale with attack speed. And 15% elite damage (but note this is additive with the elite damage from Aughild’s 3p). So The Oculus does significantly more damage to things that you don’t have Wizardspike stacked on, but as soon as you have 3-4 Wizardspike stacks on something, it starts to pull ahead. It’s way ahead once you have 10 stacks.
As for our other builds, Typhon’s prefers Wizardspike for the attack speed, you can hit a better hydra breakpoint. And again, the stacking damage mechanic is very helpful as you can run hydras without Stricken.
For Twisters and Orbs you could use either The Oculus or Wizardspike. I’ve been playing a lot of Frozen Orb and I also prefer Wizardspike for that, but it should still be decent with The Oculus. Same for Twisters. Although I do think most of the top clears with Orbs/Twisters will end up being with Wizardspike because of the stacking damage mechanic.
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When I look at the leaderboards I mostly look at the lower end and there I see lots of players with the Oculus. One reason could be what orb you have. With Wizardspike you need crit and apoc, with Oculus you only need crit and you can have a good chunk of vitality to improve toughness (and maybe not need to put paragon points in vitality). The Oculus also provides damage reduction.
Yep, that’s a good point. It’s easier to find a source to work with Oculus. And it’s a lot tankier.
Also worth pointing out that Oculus will perform relatively better in lower GRs. The lower you go, the smaller the gap between them. Wizardspike is better the closer to your limit you are trying to push, where you really need that extra damage.
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All points TinneOnnMuin said is true but alternatively for just every day grift farming and not pushing the absolute limits the 2H Mang Song’s Lesson is extremely underrated and very good, packs way bigger a punch on trash mobs especially. Also having 20M sheet damage against undead packs is pretty amazing, they go boom real fast!
Looking at the first page for what you should have in general purpose play is usually a bad idea because they’re literally trying to squeeze out and risk every last second to place a score, risking death and multiple hundreds of keys, definitely not afk style kinda lazy farm stuff you should seek for general farming.
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