Iconic wizard spells and grounded gameplay

Topic got sacked by the bot after two consecutive edit so here it is again. If the old one reappears I’ll delete it.

Wizards have some very iconic spells. Meteor, Hydra, Disintegrate, energy twister just to name a few but there is one that gets shafted pretty heavily in my opinon.

Blizzard

Brief stats 1075% Weapon damage over 6 secs in a 12 yard radius (no rune). Baseline this adds to 180% weapon damage per second, round up after some quick math.

The short coverage of the spell, the low damage output and the complete lack of supporting legendaries or set makes this spell almost impossible to have at the center of a build. Let alone to run T16.

I’m just opening up a thread about this because I haven’t seen it being discussed yet and have other wizards opinion on what blizzard is and could be in Diablo 3, aswell as a side not on deathwish being omni present in every or most build of wizards forcing channeling spells over anything else that isn’t a set (well not every set …).

Feel free to add your grain of salt or just post your build. I’d be curious to see if deathwish isn’t in it :slight_smile:

The build I run has blizzard in it but this is more a sleet storm and rimeheart roulette than a blizzard build.

I’m adding a few notes to make my point clearer if need be.

I’m currently running a “blizzard” build as in blizzard is in it. For the equipment it’s a cookie cutter LoD build with the usual offenders with a few changes for taste here and there. it does “work” on T16 but not exactly a fast build.

Note : This build uses a legacy etched sigil, which pretty much invalidates the build in terms of viability in my opinion.

The build is simple :

Ray of frost with sleet storm which is the main damage dealing ability, I have tried other runes but you would need the pierce from the off-hand to make it more crowd friendly.

Teleport with whatever rune you want, safe passage or calamity. Doesn’t really matter here.

Skill 1 is Blizzard with damage boost rune or freezing rune. Probably best to pick the freezing rune here since there is no point in adding like 50% weapon damage on top of making it 2 sec longer which isn’t really helping.

Skill 2 is frost nova with the shatter run for 33% damage boost against target frozen or chilled BY frost nova, nothing fancy but it does help with clear speed on fodder enemies with sleet storm.

Skill 3 is weapon buff with deflection because we need to live.

Skill 4 is storm armor paired with critical hit rune and corresponding halo ring.

Passives : Cold blooded, Audacity, Galvanizing ward, illusionist.

Cube :

Rimeheart (I don’t like the casino 20% chance but there isn’t much to replace it with)

Frostburn and unity ring.

The equipment is the usual LoD stack that you’d see :

Head : usualy the crystal skin legendary or any primal/ancient you have. It’s a wizard hat and the proc is pretty thematic and give another layer of defense.

Shoulders : mantle of channeling because we’re using deathwish (sigh…)

Hands : Stone gauntlets because we want to live even harder

Bracers : Ashnagarr’s Blood bracers pairs well with shield skills in the build

Chest : Aquila cuirass Because … Well, Damage reduction.

Belt : Hergbrash to go with aquila cuirass’s passive

Legs : I have tal’s but anything that’s ancient or primal that has usefull passives or stats

Boots : Ice climbers because it’s busted with stone gauntlets

Rings : halo of karini and rogar’s huge stone. Stat wise I don’t have anything better.

weapon and off-hand : Deathwish and legacy etched sigil.

My point is Blizzard is barely a primer even when trying to make a build centered around it.

Tough luck, no funny items to boost the Blizzard spell.
If you want to stay a cold mage better swap it for Mistral + Ranslor’s.

long long ago apocalypse Firebird was a thing.