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Moses #2279
Wizards In Season 4 - Feedback(1)Category: GeneralSeptember-3-2015 7:01 PM PDT (9 years ago) Go to Blizzard forum post
Hello,
Some of you may know me from the stream,and in this post I would like to talk about my experience in season 4 so far and about the passing week of grinding :)

So I quit D3 for many reasons about a year ago(after spending over 7k hours in the game since release),decided to give it another chance and joined the last 2 weeks of the PTR.

I must say I missed the game quite a bit,and the big changes like removal of trials(thanks blizzard!) and Kanai's cube made me want to get back to the good old D3 grind!
As I always do when I'm serious about things I found some players,joined a clan and had a plan!

I started as a Wizard.
We did speed leveling 1-70 in about 3 hours,geared ourselves with legendaries and started building the 6set pieces.
Things were really exciting and through the 30H marathon of D3 we managed to completly gear up our chars and get around paragon 350 which gave us the head start to begin real GR's exp grinding.

It was really awesome,and in the next couple of days I rocked my all mighty ARCHON wizard and speed grifted 35's then 45's then 50's
The progression was real and we were all feeling very satisfied.
When we reached around 550 650 paragons and started to grind those 55's thats when the 'problems' started.

You see,in the lower grifts (35-50 speed farming) the content is easy,and the wizard's weakness in unnoticed,but around 55-60 the damage is just not there,and people in my clan preffered to farm with high dps barbs and monks then with me,so even though I was the first in my clan to reach 700,because I started out with a wizard I fell behind,and I am now having problems finding good groups to get real progression,and around paragon 700,you really want to start leveling at 60+ grifts.

Of course,my all mighty archon wizard can make 60 with a struggle solo,but to really push efficient exp runs with 2 supports and 2 dps chars (arguably current meta for exp runs and high grift leaderboards) my wizard did not fit the criteria of a dps char.

This does not mean that the season is over for me,I would still love to eventually push solo grifts on the wizard leaderboards,but in order to do that,I have to have the paragons,and of course in order to achieve that,you gotta either:
1) play a fully exp geared support char such as monk barb or WD
2) play dps char such as barb or monk.

So I did what had to be done,and my friends helped me to boost a barb to 70,I leached\crafted some gear and have a really good dps barb,and also a support barb with full exp gear,now running 60+ and getting them paragons.

Vyr's set + Chantodo's are really amazing,I love the gameplay,I love the swami,I love everything about this build,but it lacks damage and that is a sad fact.

The disavantage of the build for group play is obvious,while the barbs have full uptime of effective dps,the wizards have to channel a spender to drop cooldowns of archon and stack chantodo's 20 in order to be effective.This 'slack time' to 2 things
- 'eating through' the swami stacks from the previous archon cycle
- long period of time which the wizard is completly useless and does not carry it's own weight in the party.

Those things cause to low dps overall.

Thing is,that even with over 100 stacks of swami popping archon and stacking a total of 150+ stacks,in a high grift this peak of dps will last only short few seconds,and while you struggle to kill the elites in the 55 grift,the mediocrly geard barb without an anciant gavel and with 300 less paragon levels then you will come and finish the job in few swift blows.....

The damage is not there.

In order for this build to be on par with barbs or monks,I suggest that instead 20 stacks of 350% weapon damage of chantodo's,10 stacks of 1000% weapon damage would do the trick,instead of 7000% weapon damage make it 10k.
This will allow us a shorter 'slack time' zero dps period and will bring us back to action much faster.
Also,increase swami's duration so it will overlap and allow a higher duration of peak damage
And lastly increase archon damage per stack to 7% instead of 6%.

I hope that those changes will make my wizard an appreciated member of my clan,I can't tell you how sad for me to see that I literally can't play my favorite class with my highly motivated clan.
I can't blame them for not wanting to have a wizard in the party.. they could be making 20-30% or even more experience in the time that they are spending doing the grind.
Even I don't want to farm with a wizard,so why should they?

So as for me,I will be grinding the paragons with the fotm,the barb,at least until I reach the area of the 1k paragon where I could start perfecting every item slot on my wizard and start pushing the solo wizard leaderboards.

I wish you all good luck in season 4!
Thanks for reading.
Moses.
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Vaneras
Wizards In Season 4 - Feedback(34)September-9-2015 6:15 AM PDT (9 years ago) Go to Blizzard forum post
Just wanted to drop in and say thanks for the constructive feedback :-)

I unfortunately am not able to offer much feedback in return at this point in time, but I want you to know that it's greatly appreciated that you took the time to share your experiences and thoughts on this topic.
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