It’s time to take a really close look at the Wizard class and see if we can come up the best Wizard Farming Build. Last week I shared a Demon Hunter Farming Build, I’ll try to hit each class before release. Let me know if you have any builds you’d like to share!

Goal
Just like with the Demon Hunter, my goal was to create a build focused on farming and nothing else. Therefore, I focused on movement speed, arcane power regeneration and AoE damage. Here is what it looks like: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#WcQljm!ZXc!bYZbYc. It’s obviously very imbalanced but I expect to make small adjustments to this when I play my level 60 Wizard.

Primary Skill
I went with Spectral Blade with the Siphoning Blade Skill Rune because it seems to have more damage potential than other spells, it’s an AoE and and it regenerates Arcane Power every time it hits an enemy. I think this is an all around good ability to grab for most Wizard specs and the extra Arcane Power is great. Later you’ll see I grabbed Prodigy which gives me 4 more AP everything I cast Spectral Blade. If for some reason I run out of AP this is going to help me regenerate it really quick.

Secondary Skill
I’m a huge fan of Arcane Orb already and with Tap the Source it costs 57% less Arcane Power. One of the most annoying parts in the beta is the huge amount of Arcane Power that this spell uses. This is a kick ass spell that is going to do a lot of AoE damage.

Defensive
Considering our goal of movement speed the obvious choice for this skill is Teleportation with Wormhole Rune. It will give us the speed we need to fly through dungeons searching for rare packs, elites and the next level.

Force
Here I went with Blizzard with the Snowbound rune. This 20 Arcane Power AoE does more damage than Arcane Orb and lasts for 6 seconds. I can see a combination of these two AoE spells to be very effective for Wizard AoE Farming.

Conjuration
This one is a toss up between Storm Armor with Power of the Storm Rune which reduces the cost of each ability by 3 Arcane Power vs. Familiar with Arcanot which gives you 2 Arcane Power per second. I figure Familiar is better because it will regen your arcane power while you’re out of combat and I’m thinking that 3 saved per cast is about the same as 2 gained every second in combat. If I’m wrong, I’ll just switch to Storm Armor.

Mastery
I’m not sure how you choose anything other than Archon. Based on the awesome description it works perfectly as our long-cooldown spell. I grabbed Improved Archon because I felt that this would increase the chance to maintain Archon for a longer period of time by killing more enemies. I feel like this spell is going to give us an edge over those really challenging rooms that we run into while farming.

Passives
I picked 3 Arcane Power regen passives. I feel like I went way overboard and there is a lot of room to pick up a damage passive like Glass Cannon or Cold Blooded (to buff Blizzard). The three I picked were Power Hungry (30 AP from globes), Astral Presence (20 max AP + 2AP per second) and Prodigy (4AP per cast of Spectral Blade). There is a lot of flexibility down there but I decided to start with the strong AP passives for now.

Benefits
Combined this build feels like it will never run out of AP, which was my goal. It also has buffed teleportation for flying around the dungeon looking for rare packs or elite mobs. it also has some of the most kick ass AoE abilities in the game. Arcane Orb, Blizzard and on top of that Archon with Improved Archon.

What sucks
The downsides are that there is no fire damage, just arcane and frost. There is also no strong direct damage spell and no damage buffs. I kept to the original goal pretty well and ended up with a build focused on farming so I think I did a good job. These downsides might need to be taken care of by making small sacrifices to the original goal, but only time will reveal that.

What do you think? Feel free to e-mail me any of your favorite builds and I will feature them here.

Important: Many of the strategies and tips I share here were originally inspired by the people at the Diablo 3 Gold Secrets Forum. If you're serious about making the big bucks in Diablo 3, or just being the best players, you need to signup ASAP.