6/6/2012 2:53 PM EST - added in a note to the on hit % section about critical mass and AP on crit procs, as well as some slight formatting changes.

6/7/2012 1:40 AM EST - added in a section on Elective Mode

6/7/2012 10:43 AM EST - fixed a discrepancy in the On-hit section

6/7/2012 5:13 PM EST - fixed an error in Section 7 about Critical Mass and its proccing (sp?)

Section 1: A brief overview of the Wizard

Section 2: Your role in each difficulty

Section 3: Your Stats, and what they do for you

Section 4: Your damage number explained

Section 5: Where to go from here? (Inferno strategies)

Section 6: Attack Speed and you

Section 7: Previous 'gimmick' builds and why they no longer work

Section 8: Crit and your spells

Section 9: On-hit Effects

Normal


Pretty much anything you want. Normal is meant for you to learn the class, figure out what you like doing, and make it work. You can run anything from a pure glass cannon channeled spell build to a full out melee tank with castable spells and insane tankability. You should be around lvl 30 by the time you finish Act 4 of normal, give or take a few levels based on how quickly you cleared it all.

Nightmare

Like normal, you can still do almost anything you want here. The damage has increased slightly and champion mobs have an additional attribute (such as jailer, waller, etc) but you will still be successful running pretty much everything. Some fights, specifically bosses, may be easier in one spec over another but again, you can be successful with anything. You will be in the upper 40s / lower 50s upon completion of Nightmare mode.

Hell

With Hell comes the beginning of the end for some of the more fun but DPS low builds. Mobs begin to hit much much harder and survivability becomes an issue for the first time in the game. Melee tanking is still a very viable / competitive option provided you start to gear up properly and don't try to run a 4k health melee build. You will begin to learn how to kite, a skill that you absolutely need in Inferno, towards the end of Hell. Act 4 Hell and Diablo will pose a pretty significant challenge, giving you a taste of what's to come!

Inferno

Oh boy, Inferno. All of it is doable, just...insane. Act 1 isn't too bad, and even act 2 is somewhat easy compared to 3/4. Melee tanks are all but phased out here and a pretty common complaint is that you're almost forced to run a kiting build centering around Blizzard / [enter damage type] Hydra. In groups you can run more pure DPS, but solo it's essential to have slows / getaway spells to keep from being instantly killed. Some builds focus on getting tanky enough to survive a hit or two, while others just focus on not ever being hit and go full out glass cannon. More detail on Inferno builds later

Every class has a 'main stat' that increases their damage by 1% of their "weapon damage", where that "weapon damage" is defined as (1 + passive skill boosts)(Weapon Damage + (minimum damage bonus + maximum damage bonus) / 2). For wizards, it's intelligence, which also increases all of your resistances by .1 per point. This will be very significant if you want to be somewhat tanky in later inferno acts.

The other two main stats, dexterity and strength, do not affect your damage whatsoever. However, dexterity gives bonuses to your dodge at .1% dodge per point of dexterity up to 100, .025% dodge per point up to 500, .02% dodge per point up to 1000, and .01% dodge per point past that.

Strength gives +1 armor per point, where the % of damage reduced by armor is given as
Physical damage reduction = Armor / (50 × Monster Level + Armor).

Vitality is your health stat, determining how much health you will have. Before level 35, your health is given by the formula:
Life when player level < 35 = 36 + 4 × Level + 10 × Vitality
Post lvl 35, the formula changes to:
Life when player level >= 35 = 36 + 4 × Level + (Level -25) × Vitality

Damage calculator / equipment compare available here, http://mmo-mechanics.com/diablo/compare.php . Should be fairly self explanatory, if you have any issues please let me know

Your damage number, shown on your character screen, is often pretty misleading. People think that this number is the modifier that their spells go off of, when in reality it's quite the opposite. The following is copied and pasted directly from http://mmo-mechanics.com/swtor/forums/Thread-Your-Damage-number-and-how-various-stats-affect-it :

What exactly is the "damage" number comprised of?
As given via the mouseover ingame, "The amount of damage per second you can deal based on your weapon, attributes, attack speed, Critical Hit Chance, passive skills, and dual-wielding attack speed increases"
Basically, this is the max damage you can deal per second if you were casting a spell that has no additional damage modifiers

The formula for damage is:
(1 + passive skill boosts)*(Average Weapon Damage + ((minimum damage bonus + maximum damage bonus)/2))*(Weapon Damage Multipliers)*(Attack Speed)*(1 + ( crit% * crit damage %))*( 1 + (main stat / 100))

For Dual Wielding:
((1 + passive skill boosts)*(Weapon 1 average damage + ((minimum damage bonus + maximum damage bonus)/2))*(Weapon Damage Multipliers)*(Attack Spee)*(1 + ( crit% * crit damage %))*( 1 + (main stat / 100))*(average attack speed of both weapons / weapon 1 attack speed) + (1 + passive skill boosts)*(Weapon 2 average damage + ((minimum damage bonus + maximum damage bonus)/2))*(Weapon Damage Multipliers)*(Attack Speed)*(1 + ( crit% * crit damage %))*( 1 + (main stat / 100))*(average attack speed of both weapons / weapon 2 attack speed)) * 0.575

or to simplify a little bit:

Find the damage of weapon 1 using the general damage formula, then multiply it by the average attack speed of the two weapons and divide by weapon 1's attack speed. Do the same for weapon 2, add the two numbers together, and multiply by 0.575

So how does each stat affect the "damage" number?

Primary Stat
Your primary stat increases "all damage" done by 1% per point. What exactly does this mean?
"All damage" is calculated simply by taking your weapon DPS (the number that shows up on mouseover of your weapon) and multiplying it by 1 + (crit % * crit hit %). So if you have 5% crit and 50% crit damage with a 100 DPS weapon, your "all damage" stat will be 100 * (1 + (.05 * .5)) which will come out to 102.5 DPS.
The damage bonus provided by your main stat is given by:
(Weapon dps)(Weapon multipliers)(1 + (crit chance % * crit damage %))(main stat / 100)

Attack Speed
Attack speed is a flat increase, given by Damage * (Attack speed / Weapon speed). This is why a 5% increase in attack speed may be a much larger damage increase than 100 of your main stat.

Critical Hit Chance and Criticial Hit Damage
As seen earlier with the damage modifier for your main stat, crit chance and crit damage affect your base damage modifier, given by (Weapon DPS)(1 + (crit chance % * crit damage %))

Additional Damage from Rings / Amulets / Offhands
I'm sure all of you have come across a ring with +1-3 damage on it and thought "Ah, useless!" But when you compare it to current gear, it's helping more than your +50 main stat ring. What?!
Bonus damage affects your Weapon DPS modifier through the formula:
((minimum bonus damage + maximum bonus damage) / 2)*Attack Speed
What does this mean? +Damage rings / Amulets increase your overall damage number significantly more with high attack-speed weapons, as it provides a larger percent of the normal weapon damage.

The number used for spell damage is:
(1 + passive skill boosts)(Weapon Damage + (minimum damage bonus + maximum damage bonus) / 2)(1 + (main stat / 100))
Note: the weapon damage mentioned here is NOT your DPS. This is the numbers on your weapon, giving you a range of damage from
(1 + passive skill boosts)(Min Weapon Damage + (minimum damage bonus + maximum damage bonus) / 2)(1 + (main stat / 100)) to (1 + passive skill boosts)(Max Weapon Damage + (minimum damage bonus + maximum damage bonus) / 2)(1 + (main stat / 100))
Your spells' multipliers act on that number, so a spell doing 175% damage will hit for around
(Average Weapon Damage)(1 + (main stat / 100)(1.75) damage

Applying your Damage modifier to various spells

This has been brought up quite a bit, and I guess I should have addressed it previously. Some of the spells / skills you'll use are not simply cast and run. So I'll break this down into two categories:
Channeled spells / constant damage skills (hydras included here)

Your channeled spells are pretty simple. They have a set damage modifier and they apply their damage continuously. The issue arises in that attack speed increases seem to make their ticks larger, when the formulas say attack speed has no say in the damage. What's happening?
Ticks are shown on screen at a fixed rate, approximately 2 per second. And yes, an increase in attack speed shows larger ticks. Reason behind this is your spells are applying the same damage as before, but at faster intervals since their damage is done by:
(1 + passive skill boosts)(Weapon Damage + (minimum damage bonus + maximum damage bonus) / 2)(1 + (main stat / 100))(Spell Modifier)(Attack Speed) damage per second. The ticks will show larger numbers because the damage is being applied quicker.
Also important note for hydras: their attack speed is constant. Increases in attack speed DO increase their tick damage, since their rate of attacks never changes[/b]

Of important note: Spells that do a set amount of damage over a set duration (Blizzard), do NOT have any increase in damage from attack speed. Their damage is pre-calculated on cast and is not applied any quicker / slower due to attack speed.
Castable Spells
These spells are very simple: it's simply the multiplier shown on the skill times (1 + passive skill boosts)(Weapon Damage + (minimum damage bonus + maximum damage bonus) / 2)(1 + (main stat / 100))
Since your "damage" number is only a theoretical damage per second you can do with a 1.00 modifier attack, sometimes it will be much more useful to drop some of your actual damage number to pick up more on-hit damage. I dropped two rings with +15% attack speed on each of them for some rings with +16-32 damage and lost quite a bit of numbers from that "damage" number, but my spells hit much harder and since I'm constantly kiting and only getting off one shot every couple of seconds, that is a very necessary increase and an actual benefit even though my damage number dropped.
Also of note: Right now, it seems that magic weapon for wizards is increasing the damage by twice what the tooltip says. Regardless of intellect, critical chance, attack speed, critical damage, and weapon dps, the stock bonus is a 21% increase while the runed to 15% increase is giving 32% bonus damage. I will keep looking for a reasonable explanation (no, it is not applying the bonus to main weapon and off-hand) and try to keep this updated .
Figured it out! Magic weapon is currently applying a 15% increase to weapon damage AND a 15% increase to passive bonuses. This is causing it, when applied solo, to add a (passive)(weapon modifier), or (1 + .15)(1 + .15) = 1.322 modifier. When applied in conjunction with glass cannon, a passive modifier, the damage is calculated as (1 + (.15 + .15))(1 + .15) = 1.49487 modifier.

Quoting from http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5235402096 , Arktem provided a wonderful guide for Inferno for wizards and it'd be a shame if I didn't include most of that here

So you made it to Inferno, breezing through everything with the power of arcane magic and hydras fueling you - what now? Well, the floor is open! You are free to experiment all over to find a build that works for you (personally, my favorite is http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#acQSlR!XYU!cYYZba and I use it to farm Inferno whimsyshire / act 3). There are some proven to work, though, such as the following -

Quote:Specs -

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#alQSOR!XYT!cYYZYb

Basic spec, that is useful for any and all situations. Some people prefer to replace Blizzard with Arcane Orb + Temporal Flux. Both are 100% viable, and both have their pros and cons.

Blizzard gives you a lot more control over mobs, basically it's the "Safe Route".

Arcane Orb gives you more Damage, but you have to be much more careful.

Everything else should basically stay the same in nearly all situations. Diamond skin, while very strong early on, loses a lot of it's usefulness simply because it does not scale. The only time it can be useful is for Reflect Damage mobs, which can easily be dealt with by having a few extra pieces with + Life on Hit (Note, this isn't % Life Steal), and swapping to them when the need arises.

Gear -

Boots - Every single boot you buy should have 12% movement speed. Nothing else matters.

Weapons -

2h - Two Handed weapons are superior damage over 1h/oh Combo, but they have the disadvantage of being much slower animations.

1h - have the advantage of having much faster attack animations, which in a kite spec is extremely important.

Please note if you are not using a signature spell, which I don't personally recommend, then you should always go with a strong 2h if you can get your hands on one.

Stats -

Vitality - Get 30k, maybe a bit more, then focus on other stats.

All Resist - Your number 1 defensive stat. Far more important than Vitality, assuming you have around the 30k mark.

IAS (Increased Attack Speed) - Far from useless as others seem to say. Anyone who has done testing with it knows the value of it. If you are not running a Signature Spell then IAS loses much of it's value, but again there really is no reason not to have a signature spell.

With a signature spell, and more specifically a kite solo spec, IAS is a god send. Being able to cast spells while kiting, and not lose any movement time, is absolutely amazing. I would highly recommend this stat to anyone who primarily does Solo Kite strategies.

INT - More damage is always good, but it also has an increased advantage of giving us All Resist which is HIGHLY valuable.

Crit Chance - Now that the Critical Mass build has been nerfed crit has lost much of it's appeal. With that said, once you reach about 15% crit, which isn't very difficult, it has the bonus of making Crit Damage Highly valuable.

Crit Damage - With a semi decent Crit chance, 10-15% crit damage is a very good stat to have. With 15% crit the value of having an Emerald (+70% crit damage) greatly outweighs the DPS value of a single Ruby (Bonus damage).

Farming Spots -
*Save yourself some time and pain and just skip act 2.*

Act 1 - I personally skipped all of act 1 and went straight to act 3. I just don't find the loot to be of any use, especially considering the AH. With that said many people choose to farm "The imprisoned Angel" and work their way towards Butcher.

Act 3 - Siege-breaker runs. First start a game on "Kill the Siege-breaker" and then teleport to the Bridge. This will give you "Tyrael" as a companion. Once you have him teleport to the Bridge of Korsikk. The mobs in this location are very easy to kite, as well as generally not having many "Bad Combos". This is by far my favorite place to farm. Once you reach a 5 stack kill Siege-breaker.

Apparently I wasn't quite as clear as I could be here, so I'll make AS its own section.

Spells and how they are affected by Attack Speed

Casted spells: Arcane Orb, Explosive Blast, all signature spells, Arcane Torrent and runes, Wave of Force, Blizzard, Meteor, Energy Twister

All of these spells, in terms of damage per cast, are completely unaffected by attack speed.
The only thing attack speed does for these is increase the rate at which they can be casted, thus increasing their potential damage per second, but not damage per hit.
Channeled Spells: Ray of Frost, Disintegrate, and Archon right click

These skills do their damage constantly, with 'ticks' of damage showing up approximately every .5 seconds
Since the ticks occur at a constant speed, and increasing your attack speed increases the rate at which you do the damage (and consequently, the Arcane Power spent), your tick damage will increase with increased Attack Speed. If your skill originally did 22% weapon damage every second, and you have +50% bonus attack speed, then it will do 1.5x, or 33%, weapon damage every second now. Thus your ticks will show 50% more damage
Hydras

As hydra is the cause of the most speculation, I'm giving them their own section here.
With the hydra, the attack speed of the heads is constant. Imagine each attack being a 'tick' of a channeled skill. It follows the same logic as the channeled spells then, that since attacks are done at a constant rate, that increased attack speed increases the rate at which they do damage. Therefore, and this has been proven with testing, increasing attack speed 50% will increase the damage per shot of the hydras by 50%. They will still, however, attack at exactly the same speed regardless of attack speed

Energy Armor [Force Armor] + Health Per Second / 0 Vitality
The world first inferno diablo solo clear was done using this build, which dropped vitality to as low as possible, approximately 4.7k health in total, and stacked health per second. Using Energy Armor + Force Armor reduced the amount of health you could lose per hit down to 35% of your max life. This meant that you would lose, at most, 1645 health per hit. Stacking health per second to absurd levels (anything over 1200 really) meant that you could get hit about once a second and still regen to full health before taking more damage. Abuse of this build gave essentially an invulnerability to wizards against single targets, specifically bosses.
The Nerf
This build was nerfed by a simple change to Force Armor. The rune still states incoming damage will be reduced to 35% of max life, but what it doesn't say is that the amount of damage mitigated (as in, the difference between the raw incoming hit and 35% of your life) will never exceed your max health. Confusing?

From http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5589541265 ,


Quote:Force armor will only mitigate UP to 100% of your health.

This means that if you take between 36%-135% damage you will take 35% instead.

If you take between 136%-199% damage you will take Incoming Damage - Total Health Pool.

If you take 200% damage you will die.

For instance, if you have 10k health and take a 19k hit, you will now be reduced to 1k and you will take 9k damage instead of the 3500.

Critical Mass variants

The Critical Mass build was built around, you guessed it, the Critical Mass passive. This passive reduced the cooldown on your skills by 1 second on occasion when you crit. By stacking crit chance to high levels and then spamming spells such as Shock Pulse [listving Lightning], Spectral Blade [any rune], and Energy Twister [Wicked Wind] to get a large number of crits in a very small amount of time, then spamming Frost Nova / Diamond Shell to stay untouchable.
The Nerf

The nerf was very simple, Critical Mass now procs much less frequently, rendering the entire build useless. The actual Critical Mass proc rate was unchanged, but the rate at which spell criticals cause the proc was lowered significantly. You will now no longer get enough crits in a short enough time to keep mobs perma-frozen and keep diamond shell up indefinitely

There has been a lot of confusion (on my part too!) on whether or not some skills benefit from increased crit / crit damage, as in whether or not they can crit. Cursory testing seemed to show that no, they cannot crit as many minutes spent Ray of Frosting mobs proc'd no yellow numbers. But, what I failed to realize is, as Crow pointed out here, http://mmo-mechanics.com/swtor/forums/Thread-Your-Damage-number-and-how-various-stats-affect-it?pid=22085#pid22085 , is:



Quote:I have seen that one of the posters asked, if channeled spells crit, and you said that as far as you know - no. I have not tested this personally, but I did see few reports, claiming it does. The way it works, is that as we know the damage that is displayed in 'ticks' is the total amount of damage that was dealt in 0.5 second time. If a real tick (while this is not visible to us, the damage must be applied in some sort of ticks) crits it just adds to the total damage you did over 0.5 second. So, the tick is still displayed in white number, but an actual crit has happened and so channeled spells benefit from crit as well. This was tested with Critical Mass before nerf - channeling Disintegrate did proc CM.

So in the end, every spell can crit. Channeled spells just, similar to the IAS discrepancy, do more damage in that set time and the white ticks will show larger numbers when you crit on a channeled spell.

Just to clear up a little confusion here: There are plenty of on-hit effects that you can get, whether on your weapon or ring or whatnot, such as "2% chance to knockback on hit" or "x% of damage converted to life". These effects apply to all skills, not just your signature skills. Also note that the percents shown below for life on hit also apply to arcane power on crit (say it says 30% below for a skill, and you have 10 AP on crit. When you crit with that skill, you will get 3 AP back) as well as the percent of times that your spell will proc critical mass.

A comprehensive Life-on-Hit spell % list was given here, http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5149154265 :



Quote:All of these tests were done in Act 1 of Inferno on the slow zombies. I need some help from the rest of you wizards in helping me correct and refine some of these values. They're only rough values at the moment because I haven't had time to do more extensive testing (and because the life-on-hit ring I was using was a low value, so there's rounding error). In any event, I thought it would be useful.

When I refer to a % value, that's the percent of life-on-hit you get. So if you cast Magic Missile and you have 100 life on hit, you get 100 life, but casting Arcane Orb only gives you 33 life per target hit by the explosion.

EDIT: Updated values! More accurate! As of May 29, 2012

Life per Hit (Inferno)

-------------SIGNATURE SPELLS--------------
Magic Missle:
-Charged Blast: 100% (single target)
-Split: 33.8% per target hit
-Penetrating Blast: 24.6% per target hit
-Attunement: 100% (single target)
-Seeker: 100% (single target)

Shock Pulse:
-Explosive Bolts: 16.5% per target hit per bolt + 33% on explosion
-Fire Bolts: 33% per target hit. This includes per bolt. If more than 1 bolt hits, you get the benefit of both (ie: 2 bolts is double the healing 1 bolt is)
-Piercing Orb: 25% per target hit
-Lightning Affinity: 33% per target hit
-Living Lightning: 2% per tiny shock.

Spectral Blade:
-Deep Cuts: 88.8% per target per triple hit, bleed generates no healing.
-Impactful Blade: 66.6% per target per triple hit.
-Siphoning Blade: 66.6% per target per triple hit.
-Healing Blades: 66.6% per target per triple hit.
-Thrown Blade: 33.3% per target per triple hit.

Electrocute:
-Chain Lightning: 16.5% per target hit
-Forked Lightning: 16.7% per target hit, unsure of auxiliary bolt healing (test?)
-Lightning Blast: 16.7% per target hit, successive hits heal all in one tick as a lump sum
-Surge of Power: 25% per target hit
-Arc Lightning: 16.7% per target hit

-------------SECONDARY SPELLS--------------

Ray of Frost:
- (All Runes): 33% per tick for all runes except Sleet Storm. Remember that ticks are every half second, so if you channel for 2 damage ticks (ie: anything longer than a brief touch), you'll see a 66% healing number because it adds them up.
-Sleet Storm: 50% per target per tick

Arcane Orb:
-Obliteration: 33% per target hit
-Arcane Orbit: 25% per target hit
-Arcane Nova: 16.7% per target hit
-Tap the Source: 33% per target hit
-Celestial Orb: 20% per target hit

Arcane Torrent:
-Disruption: 20% per missile per target hit
-Death Blossom: 60% per missile per target hit
-Arcane Mines: 50% per mine explosion per target hit
-Power Stone: 20% per missile per target hit
-Cascade: 20% per missile per target hit, cascading missiles generate no healing (? needs further testing)

Disintegrate: (remember that ticks are every half second, so if you channel for longer than 0.5 seconds, you see the sum of the healing for 1 second or 1 tick, which is 22% per target). A "touch tick" in this case is just tapping the monsters with the beam for 1/4 second, not channling.
-Convergence: 11% (22%) per target per touch tick.
-Chaos Nexus: 11% (22%) per target per touch tick + 11% (22%) per target per tick of the sub-beam.
-Volatility: 12.5% (25%) per target per touch tick, explosion value unknown for now
-Entropy: 16.7% (32%) per target per touch tick
-Intensify: 16.7% (32%) per target per touch tick

NOTE: Wraith in this thread did some testing with conflicting results. Here are his results for Disintegrate:

-Convergence: 33.3% per ½ second (per target hit)
-Chaos Nexus: piercing beam 33.3% per ½ second (per target hit), small beams 22.2% per ½ second against 1 target, being near 2 targets gave inconsistent results but seemed to average around 33.3% per ½ second (more testing required), 3 targets either kill me or die too quickly at the spots I tried testing at.
-Volatility: 23.46% per ½ second (per target hit), explosion ???
-Entropy: 50% per ½ second (per target hit)
-Intensify: 50% per ½ second (per target hit)

-------------DEFENSIVE SPELLS--------------
Frost Nova:
-Frozen Mist: 10% per target per tick in the ice patch

Teleport:
-Calamity: 10% per target hit by the wave on arrival

-------------FORCE SPELLS--------------
Wave of Force:
-Impactful Wave: 16.7% per target hit
-Force Affinity: 16.7% per target hit
-Forceful Wave: 16.7% per target hit
-Teleporting Wave: 16.7% per target hit
-Exploding Wave: 16.7% per target per hit. Sub-waves do not generate any healing.

Energy Twister:
-Mistral Breeze: 10% per target per tick
-Gale Force: 10% per target per tick
-Raging Storm: 10% per target per tick, for both big and little tornados
-Wicked Wind: 10% per target per tick
-Storm Chaser: 10% per target per tick of the regular tornados, 21.4% per target per tick for the big sig tornado

Hydra:
-(All Hydras): 0%, they don't heal

Meteor:
-Molten Impact: 50% per target per impact, plus 25% per burning tick per target
-Star Pact: 50% per target per impact, plus 25% per burning tick per target
-Meteor Shower: 19.7% per target per impact
-Comet: 50% per target per impact, plus 25% per cold tick per target
-Liquefy: 50% per target per impact, plus 25% per burning tick per target

Blizzard:
-Grasping Chill: 2% per tick per target
-Frozen Solid: 2% per tick per target
-Snowbound: 2% per tick per target
-Stark Winter: 1% per tick per target
-Unrelenting Storm: 2% per tick per target

-------------CONJURATION SPELLS--------------
Familiar:
-(All Familiars): 0%, they don't heal

-------------MASTERY SPELLS--------------
Archon:
-Arcane Destruction: 20% on explosion per target hit
-(Archon beam ability): 25% per target per tick
-(Archon melee ability): 50% per target hit
-(Archon explosion ability): 20% per target hit

Explosive Blast:
-Unleashed: 33% per target hit
-Time Bomb: 33% per target hit
-Short Fuse: 33% per target hit
-Obliterate: 12.5% per target hit
-Chain Reaction: 11% per target hit per each explosion (you get 3 explosions per cast of the spell)