Wizard Inferno Build

A Wizard was reportedly one of the very first classes to solo kill Diablo on Inferno difficulty. The trick that was used was to kite Diablo while using damage over time and companion support. The build used was an elective build that utilized companions, massive survival skills, quick-cast AoEs, increased damage passives and the likes. This build is built to kill just about anything you can find as long as you have enough time to sit around and kite, cast, dodge and dance. Here’s how it works:

There are no primary, secondary, etc abilities here. Just grab the abilities and put them into whatever key bindings you want them in.

Venom Hydra. This companion will continually attack your target regardless of whether you’re standing still, kiting or talking on the phone.

Blizzard. Cast this while you’re on the move and the ice will do the rest. Use the Unrelenting Storm skill rune if you’re level 60 otherwise just maximize the damage accordingly. Cast… run! Cast… run! Save up your Arcane Power to make sure this is going as often as possible.

Slow Time. Slow down your target and speed up your allies. This is an essential aspect of this build that allows you to survive without costing extra Arcane Power. The cool down is 20 seconds, if you use it every 20 seconds you’ll increase your chances of survival significantly. The Stretch Time skill rune is exaggerates the effect of this skill. If you’re not level 53 consider using Perpetuity to increase the frequency that you can use this ability.

Diamond Skin. This one goes without explanation. Adsorb up to 21,707 damage every 15 seconds without using any Arcane Power. The Crystal Shell skill rune makes this very powerful.

Energy Armor with Force Armor. This is the 2 minute buff of choice for this build. It increases your armor but reduces your Arcane Power. Your Arcane Power cap won’t matter in a long fight that involves tons of kiting since you’ll seldom let your AP build up higher than 50-60.

Magic Weapon. This is a ‘passive’ ability in that you only have to cast it every 5 minutes. With the Force Weapon skill rune you’ll get 15% more damage as long as this is kept up.

Passives are selected to increase damage and regenerate Arcane Power. To regenerate AP select Astral Presence. To buff your Blizzard (your only real attack here) use Cold Blooded and to buff all damage use Glass Cannon.

As you can see the only Arcane Power attack is Blizzard and it has no cooldown. You’ll generate the AP quickly with Astra Presence. Your damage is increased 15% with Magic Weapon and 15% with Glass Cannon. You’ll get another 20% buff to Blizzard with Cold Blooded. Blizzard’s skill rune: Unrelenting Storm will increase it’s damage to 280% and make it rain for 8 seconds total.

Keep your Hydra out along with Energy Armor and Magic Weapon active. Use Blizzard every time it’s available. Use Slow Time everytime it’s up and Diamond Skin whenever you need it but no more often than every 15 seconds.

This build should help you defeat any boss with your Wizard. Good luck!

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.

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6 Comments.

  1. I’m sorry to say this, but it appears you don’t understand what this build is for, yet you try to explain the skill choices… This is a build specifically made for killing DIABLO on Inferno, It’s pretty useless as a standard Inferno Build.

    Also Force Armor is the core of this build (and the standard Inferno build aswell) yet you don’t even mention that you need close to base hp and life steal for this to work.

    All in all it appears you wrote a guide without any background information on a subject you know nothing about…

    • Drez, if you want to rewrite or write a better guide (or many guides) let me know I’d be happy to publish it here under your name and with your ads. Send me an e-mail (webmaster@wow-farming.info) if you’re interested.

  2. I’m not a native english speaker so I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing a full organized guide for the public.

    Also Force Armor was reportedly stealth nerfed, so I can’t even be sure if the build is still efficient enough.

    I’ll just give the basic ideas here for you to work off of.

    First of all these builds were based on having around 5k hp. That was the maximum damage you could take was around 1750. The tricks is that Diamond Skin still absorbs 20k damage, so with Diamond Skin on you could tank pretty much anything, except fast ticking damage over time spells. Also you itemize for maximised intellect and life steal, so that with around 40k dps you refill lost life pretty fast if you keep attacking. Life regen is overrated in my opinion, since it regens life too slow to make a difference in most situations. Having it without gimping your DPS helps (only possible on rares, since ideal blues would be %attack speed+int for rings/amulets/gloves and the int+str/dex prefix and int suffix blues for the highest dps).

    Life steal gives you the fastest regen, but it still doesnt mean you can just stand there and take hits unless there is only one enemy who can hit you.

    Trash mobs: you want to burn them fast before they reach you with the spell of your choice (disintegrate, arcane orb, arcane torrent etc whatever works for you) and pop diamond skin when you took one or two hits. Before Diamond Skin expires you will have healed back up. With high enough dps you only need to use diamond skin for ranged mobs, since melee ones die before they reach you.

    In order to have such high damage, you use glass cannon, negative armor doesn’t matter cause Force armor is calculated AFTER damage reduction obviously, so you always lose 35% of your hp anyway. Astral Peresnce is the next one cause thats the only other spell which directly increases your dps (unless you use cold spells, cause cold blooded than). The last one could be Galvanizing ward for the life regen if you don’t have life steal, Pordigy for the added DPS, if you have such high attack speed (1,5+) that you need to use a signature spell frequently. Note that having 40k+ dps is only really possible by using attack speed gloves/rings/amulets, so usually you’ll have 1,5 or faster attack speed even with a 2 hander.

    So a standard build for clearing most of inferno efficiently looks like this:

    1) Signature spell, to fall back on when you’ve used up your arcane power. Only needed with fast attack speeds with which you can run out of arcane power, before you kill the mobs. (my personal preference: Electrocute with Lightning Blast, since it travels fast, has a doubled firing rate, and it’s an AoE. Other notable mention is Shock Pulse with piercing orb, it deals more damage, but the pathing is a tiny bit too random for my taste.

    2) Low cost arcane power spender nuke. (my perefence is disintegrate with chaos nexus, it deals continous damage, so there is no damage wasted on overkills, it’s aoe and has no projectile time,starts dealing damage isntantly, and the runed effect gives it an AoE around you, to stop weakling swarms from oneshotting you.)

    3) Magic Weapon. DPS is all this build is about.
    4) Hydra. Same as reason as magic weapon, also you can kite kill most of the champions with this (turn on diamond skin when they manage to catch you and nuke 3-4 seconds), but there are champions which you just can’t kill with a standard build.
    5) Diamond Skin with Crystal shell.
    6) Energy armor with Force Armor.

    I’ve already talked about the last two.

    Most bosses can be killed with this build, but some require special variations (Iskatu, Diablo, Azmodan and maybe Belial, on inferno).

    These variations can mean taking blizzard with cold blooded as the arcane power spender spell, and getting one more utility spell instead of the signature for cases where you just can’t ever stand still and nuke, and need to kite all the time. Frost nova as the utility spells when there are swarms of enemies, who oneshot you if they attack at the same time (Belial adds if you dont have enough dps, iskatu) Azmodan oneshots you with the ground aoe, so you go all out full dps there (12 ap cost ray of forst, familiar, maybe even archon..) to kill him before he decides to put one right under you. For Diable you take slow time as the utility spell, since he one shots you with his fireball EVEN with Crystal Shell up, so you must avoid it, or slow time it, or you wipe…

    A viable solution for the nastier champions is taking Illusionist+Teleport Fracture instead of the signature and prodigy. (with slow attack speeds this can be standard too). That way you can escape ground aoes, walls, roots, while having 2 decoys to give you some more time to stand still and leech life back. (Blizzard hydra kiting is viable here aswell, but USUALLY if you can’t kill them with the standard build or the one modified with teleport+illusionist, the blizzard kiting way won’t help much either.)

    Ok well that was more than just the basic idea behind this build, but I don’t feel like formatting it to be nicer looking better built up.

  3. Force Armor was hotfixed to do nothing. So this build is useless now :)

    • force armour is still good, you just need a bit more health and mitigation (armour + resistances) for it to be useful. Blizzard made the change so that wizards in inferno would still be required to care about their health and mitigation.

      As long as an incoming hit would not do over 100% of your hp after mitigation force armour still works as usual.

      i.e. total wizard health is 10,000

      incoming hit is 25,000 damage, but armour and resistances reduce the power to 9,000 damage. Since in this situation the total damage is under 100% of the wizards hp, force armour rune will kick in and reduce the damage to 1/3 of the wizards hp.

    • For a non-native english speaker you sure managed to crap out 8+ decent paragraphs…

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