Official Site: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/
Source: Youtube Channel Archon InfernoFriday
There was a lag time for a while where my friends and I just stopped playing Diablo 3 like much of the community had as end-game didn't provide much replay value (especially those who already beat Inferno difficulty) and those who didn't have the right gear constantly died which resulted in a rapidly diminishing gold resource. Blizzard has been hard at work re-balancing the game to even out the difficulty, make all classes fair (to prepare them for PvP in the future), re-adjusted the stats on items, and providing more progression for players who have reached inferno. I was sad about the nerf to attack speed as many classes relied on it to complete inferno; however, all classes have been given a huge buff in power and the game now has an extra 100 levels to climb through past 60 called "Paragon Level" which further improves stats as well as increasing gold and magic find. In this way, Blizzard has virtually extended the end-game content by a lot. It doesn't provide anything new, but it gives quite an incentive for those who find entertainment value in farming. Farming can be difficult when you don't have the right gear and can't survive enemy attacks, even for the beloved Wizard class who has been considered the most OP class from the very beginning. But it seems that players have found a build for the Wizard that allows them to Tank, DPS (Damage Per Second) and Burst all in one go. They call this build "Critical Mass."
The build thrives from one of the Wizard's passive ability to shorten the cooldown of all their abilities by one second for each critical hit they land so that the skills can be spammable. What's crazy about this build is that the player can run into a large mob and constantly do damage, increase durability, and land a lot of burst AoE (Area of Effect) damage without the need of range abilities or a generate attack. The build is as follows:
Active Skills:
-Energy Twister/Storm Chaser (DPS) - This ability hits multiple enemies multiple times which increases the chance of a critical much higher.
-Explosive Blast/Chain Reaction (Burst) - The blasts will help soften enemies up or take them out all around you and can be spammed.
-Diamond Skin/Crystal Shell - (Tank) - It is this ability that will keep your character alive as it absorbs a lot of damage and can be spammed.
-Frost Nova/Bone Chill (Utility) - Having this ability not only damages enemies, but also prevent them from hitting you. With everything else combined, your wizard would never get hit.
-Magic Weapon/Force Weapon (Damage) - This can be switched out to anything that would help in increasing damage to providing more.
-Energy Armor/Prismatic Armor (Survivability) - Critical hits activate on "chance" and so not all your skills will protect you. This helps a bit to prevent getting one-shotted.
Passive Skills:
-Critical Mass - Above all else, the build relies on this passive skill. It shortens the cooldowns of all skills whenever your character lands a critical hit by 1 second. With the Energy Twister and Explosive Blast, critical hits should trigger quite often and allow the player to continually spam their skills.
The other passive skills can be modified to work with whatever the player needs. If they're not dying as often, Cold Blooded and Glass Cannon can help increase the damage output. But if survivability is an issue, skills like Blur to decrease physical damage or evocation to shorten the cooldown on skills even further so that Diamond Skin and Frost Nova can be used more often to ensure protection.
Creating this build still takes quite a bit of farming to do to make it work:
-Critical Hit Chance: Archon (within the video) suggests having at least 30% or more for this build to start working and can be increased by finding items with those stats on it.
-Armor, Vitality and All Resistance: Your Wizard is going to be in the middle of the fray the entire time and needs as much protection as possible to avoid getting one-shotted and so having these defense stats up is important to stay alive.
-Life on Hit/Kill: Honestly, having these on any class help tremendously so that the player doesn't have to rely so much on potions (which has its own cooldown) and health globes (which appear by chance). Archon suggests having a total of at least 800 Life on Hit.
-Intelligence and Critical Hit Damage: This is where the damage and killing power will come from. Even with all that defensive equipment and abilities, you're going to die if you're not killing enemies fast enough as it's easy to be overwhelmed (especially with special mobs that have "waller", "frozen", or "vortex").
TL;DR Version:
-Tank, DPS and Burst all at the same time
-Equip "Critical Mass" and items/abilities that help it
-Mash all the buttons as fast and hard as you can
This is a big incentive for me to max out my Wizard now.
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