Let’s not forget the generous hitboxes for Khazra spear chuckers. See projectile in mid air, move out of the way, and nope, it magically absorbed by your “shadow” you left behind and now you are down to a fifth health.
I used Diamond Skin for that, your theory has no consideration. I’ve seen a friend tanking an enraged 2-player MP5 (maybe more, it was a long time ago) Azmodan with 40% hitpoints, and killing him thanks to tanking the sludge he blankets the whole area with the Diamond Skin.
Firstly, there was no crowd control resistance for monsters, nor monsters building up immunity against such effects back then. That actually made Paralysis and Temporal Flux a valid choice to stall the crowd and unleash more attacks on them as you kite and await cooldowns.
Secondly, if you can not counter certain monster types directly, you supposed to abuse crowd control, or stack reduced damage taken from ranged/melee depending on your approach. If you don’t like getting Vortex into the middle of monsters, then perhaps you need damage reduced from melee and reduced crowd control effect duration. Because if you were at long range, then you supposed to kill or highly damage them all before incurring too much damage.
For example, Dexterity had dodge back then but it was wonky at best; so it has to stack both types of damage mitigation on top of aiming for higher life regeneration so it can recover as long as it doesn’t die in one hit. That being the third point, itemization in vanilla actually encouraged you to stack multiple main stats along your farming to find a balance between resistance, armor and dodge rating, regardless of the class.
Not really. You just had to theorycraft and optimize, as in; covering your weaknesses.
Best equipment could have been found in GAH as well. You just needed a keen eye for it; as in understanding the very convoluted mechanics of the game back then.
I never said that will suffice alone; it’s just a good combination for mobility and defense. For exceptions, you still have to use Diamond Skin or Archon as much as any generic Wizard build at that era. You had to mind several aspects of defense when designing a build, just like today.
If you don’t like getting ping ponged then maybe get Diamond Skin or Archon so you would at least tank it or avoid it for a while? Honestly, just that combination could get you out with enough damage mitigation because Illusionist would reset your Teleport when you get cornered like that. There were no Shield Pylons back in vanilla D3.
One passive does not determine the entire class; just like Nova-RoF-EB CM Wiz doesn’t determine the entire Wizard class. It was a fine gimmick for standing your ground, but there are many ways to play a class just right as there are many different builds that doesn’t rely on one passive, but using different ones in conjunction with each other.
You just refused to explore by yourself and it’s your choice. I don’t see any point to complain about one passive going down into the past and digging it back so hard. Sure it was fun but spare me your woes. Wizards have more ways to maintain Teleport cooldown now and bringing CM back would severely undermine them.
Sure.