Friday 13 July 2012

A Wizard Viable Build Using Disintegrate

Friday, July 13, 2012  sQren  



I've always been in love with disintegrate (it's one of the reasons I picked Wiz over DH), but it requires you to stand still. At last, I've played around to find a somewhat viable build using it.
Concept
Passives: Illusionist, Arcane Dynamo, Critical Mass
  • Spectral Blades (Deep Cuts): High proc rate restores cooldowns, gives AP, and procs Arcane Dynamo. Since Deep Cuts' DoT can also proc, you only need to hit once or twice, wait a while, and you've built up 5 stacks of AD and taken a few seconds off your cooldowns.
  • Disintegrate (Chaos Nexus): AD'd Disintegrate has 271% damage that you can sit and cast. Chaos Nexus' small lasers also have a small chance to proc things (10-20%?) but in close range fire really quickly. With AP on crit, close range, and enough enemies, you can channel Disintegrate for quite a long time.
  • FA (Prismatic): Pretty obvious. You want prismatic because you'll actually be taking a few hits with this build (granted it'll often be under a diamond skin)
  • Diamond Skin (Crystal): Obvious because you have to tank every once in a while. Also, hits taken while under DS proc illusionist, so going in to melee usually resets your teleport and MI. If you have problems with AP, you could switch this to Prism.
  • Mirror Image (Duplicates): CC breaker; this spell pretty much hard-counters most CC affixes. The illusions also help a lot to let you sit and channel Disintegrate without being hit too much.
  • Teleport (Safe Passage): Safe Passage is useful in this case because it'll help prevent your DS from breaking. You don't have enough AP to use Wormhole, and Fracture destroys your MI duplicates. Arguably, you could use Fracture and not MI, but Fracture isn't as good of a CC breaker, and has fewer illusions to distract mobs away from you.
Pros
  • Does damage at all distances, with low projectile travel time. Also has high upfront damage (no need to build up tornadoes and wait for delayed EB's, waiting for arcane orbs to hit enemies, or waiting for venom hydras to build venom)
  • Is very well-rounded against most affixes. Plenty of CC breaks with Illusionist (frozen / jailer). Plenty of teleporting with Illusionist/CM (arcane / vortex). Tanks damage (molten / reflect / plagued / teleport). Disintegrate penetrates (invulnerable / shielding).
  • Is decent at running through mobs, as you can tank damage with DS and teleport often with illusionist. MI also provides supple distraction.
  • If used correctly, has nice DPS from the AD'd disintegrate.
  • Pretty fun / unique if you're tired of kiting with orb/blizz builds or don't want carpal tunnel from WW builds
  • Viable with slow weapons
Cons
  • Cold Blooded / GC don't really work well with this build.
  • Not as simple as kite/WW builds, as you need to concentrate to properly rotate your cooldowns.
Gear
  • High AP on crit. Get it on 1 item for 2H, or 2 items for 1H. Necessary for channeling Disintegrate. Alternatively you could look for Disintegrate cost reducing gear.
  • High crit %
  • High defense, since you can't use FA.
  • LoH is very helpful. I run with 1K+.
  • Moderate HP (30-35K). Too high and you don't proc Illusionist as often.

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