by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Welcome back to BlizzPro. I’m Dannie “Ideal” Ray, today I’m going to highlight two Wizard Skills that I feel don’t see as much play as they should. Come take a look at these two builds that I quickly put together, they’ll show you the value that these skills can have when they are used right.

The Armored Mage

Prism might not look like much as first,  9 Arcane Power doesn’t seem much when you consider 40 AP Cost meteors and 30 AP cost orbs. They key for Prism is that it applies after RCR, with enough of it 9 less AP starts looking a lot more appealing.

What if you use lower cost abilities like Ray of Frost, Disintegrate, or Arcane Torrent? Those 9 AP suddenly become a big part of the total, even moreso when you start factoring in RCR.

Now, 3 out of 15 doesn’t seem particularly appealing but you can always add some CDR to the mix. The 20% CDR passive along with a Diamon on the Helm could go a long way towards getting you some much needed extra uptime.

Actives:

Disintegrate – Entropy

Black Hole – Event Horizon

Frost Nova – Cold Snap

Diamond Skin – Prism

Teleport – Safe Passage

Ice Armor – Crystallize

Passives: Blur, Evocation, Astral Presence, Unwavering Will.

Get yourself Slorak’s Madness and Pair it up with a Stormshield, stack Arcane and Disintegrate damage and have some fun. Activate your armor and teleport into the middle of the battle where you can start channeling the Forces of entropy. Frost Nova will help decrease your incoming damage, Black Hole will do the same and get rid of those pesky elite effects, teleport will get you out of a tough spot in a pinch.

If you find that you have too much control, but are running out of resource to quickly. Be sure to trade a skill out for Familiar – Arcanot.

Stone of Jordan, Reaper’s Wraps, Aughild’s Set, Captain Crimson’s Set, are all items that will help you out here. Stack Critical Hit Chance and Damage and get yourself some Life on Hit so you can stay in the fight longer.

It’s now up to you to find out how much Resource Cost Reduction and Cooldown Reduction you need.

Black Rasha’s Elements

Power of the Storm has a similar effect. It has less potency but it is active all the time. It lends itself to pretty interesting builds.

Ray of Frost – Black Ice

Teleport – Wormhole

Storm Armor – Power of the Storm

Magic Weapon – Ignite

Familiar – Arcanot

Black Hole – Absolute Zero.

Passives: Elemental Exposure, Astral Presence, Unwavering Will, Unstable Anomaly.

Mostly a typical Tal Rasha’s Elemental Exposure Build that will allow you to spam Black Ice all you want as long as you aren’t getting brutally murdered. A build like this lacks survavility and would work much better in a party setting.

[d3item name= “Light of Grace”] makes Ray of Frost just so much better, get yourself Frostburn and stack both Cold damage and Ray of Frost Damage for some pretty cool damage.

Get yourself an Ess of Johan so you can ensure that will enemies stay in the path of your beam, having this amulet might help make your Black Ice Pools that much more effective.

Conclusions

The Diablo 3 team has done a wonderful job of giving us a lot of different options, so there’s lot of ways to play each class. Sadly, the game isn’t as balanced as we’d like to be; this causes that certain playstyles are often not given the attention they deserve. If you are bored with the same cookie cutter spec, you can try out some of the really underdated skills that the Wizard has to offer.

You don’t have to do a carbon copy of those builds I put up above, those were just two quick drafts I made to prove a point. Feel free to try them out, swap things around, or simply borrow some of the concepts into your own build.

In any case, be sure to follow me on twitter @DannieRay23 and tell me if you were able to put Prism and Power of the Storm to good use.

That’s it for today, but be sure to keep checking BlizzPro Daily for some of the best Diablo content on the web.