Blue weapon > Yellow weapon

Apparently as wizard you don't need any stats on your weapon other than massive damage and attack speed. Well, of course those are useful and such, but if you want to maximize your damage output and have limited budget then just do what I did:

1. Go to Auction House
2. Search for 2-hand weapons (all types)
3. Filter those that have 20%+ attack speed and cost <1M
4. Sort by DPS column
5. Purchase something that has high damage/cost ratio
6. Enjoy your 10K damage increase:

New weapon = new DPS record

OMFG! Just purchased this awesome weapon on AH for 500K and got my DPS bumped by 8K instantly (under magic weapon, sparkflint and glass cannon)!!! Beware Belial, I'm coming! :)

First legendary drop! And some yellows.

After few days of farming, I finally got my first orange item!!

It's certainly not the best item that I looted, but I'm still pleased to have it. And will be even more pleased to sell it for good $$$ on AH :) I didn't play tank, but hopefully "Reduce damage from melee attacks" is a valuable stat.

As far as drop goes, I'm really excited each time I get yellow ring or amulet - these things often cost a lot! For instance I've updated my rings today with these freshly farmed ones (Act III Hell):

This pulled my damage stat to a new record of 31K (with magic weapon and glass cannon). Attack speed IS the king!

Attack speed FTW

By the way, I discovered just recently, that attack speed is really important dps stat for mage. Just by getting those blue gloves with 15% attack speed my damage increased by almost 2K!

I also found that very few items may have AS on them, so that is a valuable stat to have.

Inferno progress

Inferno is going tough, managed to finish Act I so far. Played it a bit with Monk tanking - that part was much easier, without tank its a lot of kiting which is time consuming.

I was trying to wear high magic find gear set, but didn't get any significant drops yet. Thus decided to switch to optimal damage/defense instead and progress ASAP, hoping to find something on the way (e.g. good farming opportunities).

As of now, with magic weapon and glass cannon buffs on I have 31K health, 19788 damage and 57% magic find (no nephalem buff):

As you may notice I also wear couple blue items because nothing better has dropped and prices on AH for similar yellows are 200K+. Time to hunt some luck on this long weekend!

Hell, yeah!

Diablo down three times now, entering Inferno level.. this is where the real challenge supposed to start, right?

First legendary item!

OK, it didn't drop (I still haven't seen neither orange nor green drops), but I got it from AH:

Isn't it cool? Boosted my damage by about 800 instantly! But that's not the best part. Remember how I sold amulet for 750K? Guess how much I paid for legendary weapon? Ready??

I got the weapon above just for 70K!! AH ftw. Can't wait for real money one ;)

Auctioning on Hell ... 750K sale

Oh my god! Posted a rare amulet this morning for 890K gold and it is sold now!! +750K in cash just from one item drop on Hell. Wondering if the buyer hopes to resell it for real money in a future OR it was indeed such a great amulet..

Vitality or Magic Find?

Heh, you may have noticed how I built high magic find (~100%) into my items set. Of course it comes with a sacrifice of some other useful stat, mostly vitality in my case (i.e. it is extremely hard/expensive to find  items that have both intelligence, vitelity and magic find).

However since I'm playing on hell, sometimes I'm getting in trouble with rare monsters that kill me waaaaay too fast. Thus I have secondary item set in my bags, which has about the same damage stats, but replaces magic find with vitality. If I wear all those items on, I'm suddenly a 38K health mage with 5700 damage and 22% magic find! 

Impressive, huh? However even that much health often not enough on Hell (lvl 57), so I'm planning to build alternative sets. Things to try stacking: crit chance/crit damage, armor, resistances. 

What's your items priorities?

Farming XP

I've tried farming XP (and magic items) on lvl 50 and lvl 56, here is my experience:

lvl 50 - Azmodan Nightmare

Time: 10 min

XP: ~150K

Start at the last quest of Act III, go through 2-3 rare/champ groups, kill the boss. It took me 6-10 mins per run (depending on champs). After finishing the boss you got 45K for quest and then immediately after you got another 45K for the next quest!! Plus ~60K from killing monsters. Overall a really nice easy run, I levelled from 50 to 51 in about 40 minutes (510K XP).

My stats for this runs:

13K health

2410 damage

88% magic find

lvl 56 - Zultan Kulle Hell

Time: 3-5 min

XP: ~110K

I've killed him first time very fast and was pleased to get 98K for quest, so I stopped and farmed him till level 57. Pretty easy and fast run in my setup. Slowing-kiting-killing golems, then dodging tornadoes and finishing the boss. There are no monsters to kill before encounter, you basically spawn straight to the boss.

My stats for this run:

20K health

5600 damage

104% magic find

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#iRXQSO21bYaaaaZ!YfU!abZZZb

Temporal flux passive is super important - without it golems reach you and make life hard. After golems down, the mechanic is simple - wait for diamond skin and teleport cooldowns, run (not jump) to the boss, use diamond skin and burn with disintegrate (or whatever), then jump away and repeat. All this time hydra and your follower also doing some dps. Oh and note Wormhole rune on teleport - without 3 jumps it will be much harder to dodge some of Kulle's stuff!

My best Auction House sell so far

Is a rare lvl 32 (or so) amulet with great warrior stats and socket. I sold it for 50000 in 15 minutes!

Wizard lvl 45 - Beefy Mage or Anti-Belial build

So I get to Nightmare Belial with my jumper build and set of items giving me ~1500 damage. This was pretty sweet run throw nightmare so far with perfect escape abilities (teleport, mirror, diamond skin) and enormous damage from my passives and disintegrate. However Belial proved my build weakness - I've died ~20 times before realizing it's not mechanics but build that is not good :)

So I took a deep breath (it was at 4am) and started looking through my skills again. I realized, that teleport and mirror doesn't help me that much in this fight. Also, since I was hunting intelligence and magic find (which I got up to 80%) on my items, vitality was quite low (~3000hp). Luckily enough, I didn't throw a single rare item that had high vitality, which allowed me to come up with the following solution:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#iRXjST21bYaaaaZ!YfX!aZZbZZ

After wearing all vitality items I got my HP bumped to.. 9000! Moreover, with Galvanization Wand passive I also got 100/s health regen!! That sounded promising. But what about damage? Well, it got significantly down, but look - I have enhanced Magic Weapon in place of teleport now! This boosted damage up to 1200, which I figured is OK.

Finally, I noticed new rune on Familiar which I didn't see before - Ancient Guardian. I couldn't bypass it for this fight..

As a result  - with this new build I was able to one shot Belial!! Of course numerous failed attempts in the past gave me a lot of mechanics understanding, which I completely ignored on Normal due to OP Tornadoes ;)

Diablo III and your graphics card

I was planning to get a new graphics card for D3. My current one is OK (Geforce GTX 260), but have one nasty issue - whenever it heats up it doesn't adjust the cooling automatically (cooler spin rate) so I have to do it manually via RivaTuner every time I play graphics-intensive game. If I don't do that, then card heats above 75 C and graphics in a game "crashes" (start showing random artefacts). For SC2 I set cooler to ~70% of max speed. For LoL I leave on default 40%..

It became much worse in Diablo, where it started crashing sometimes even under 100% :( I refused to reduce graphics quality for this game and almost became desperate (cause I want to play and not wait for newegg delivery!), when I found the solution! Few changes to the D3 video settings reduced heating to stable ~66C and didn't make game look any much worse:

1. shadows OFF (biggest win) 
2. foreground frame rate 80 (cause I don't think 150 is really needed?)
3. Anti-aliasing OFF (not sure this one really needed, by I didn't notice much of difference anyway)

Voila! I can keep playing on "High" settings and delay my new video card purchase :)

P.S. There was a funniest crash one time, when I start seeing "Temporary art" textures in a game which is normally hidden somewhere under permanent textures ;)

Running out of space in stash/bags?

I'm using my second account to store stuff that I don't want to throw/sell yet. This gives you extra 80 slots per level 1 character you create. Just launch two clients, join the same private game and pass your precious stuff  to other character! This also increases your AH limit to 20 items at a time :)

Now, I'm not sure if guest pass would allow you to create more characters for storage, but worth a try! Looks like that key is still not taken ;)

Wizard lvl 35 - Jumper build

Although it was fun to play with Tornadoes, I had to completely change my build in Act IV, where there are fights in open areas with enemies teleporting, stunning and doing massive damage. Now it consists of 3 defensive skills (diamond skin, mirror image, teleport), 2 passive damage ones (storm armor and hydra) and only 1 offensive (disintegrate):

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#iRXPQT21bYaaaaZ!YdX!aZZaZZ

Note how I'm still favoring global arcane cost reduction runes on diamond skin and storm armor. Apparently, disengrate doing so much damage, that its alone is enough to kill enemies. The only issue with it is high cost, which is kind of solved by this runes.

I called this build jumper for two reasons. Wormhole gives me ability to make 3 jumps in a row, which is not only awesome life but also time saver (when you need to come back through labirint). Illusionist on its turn ensures that if I jump into elite monster pack I can always instantly jump back.

The way I'm playing this build atm: spawn hydra in front of you to detect enemies as early as possible. Shoot Disintegrate as soon as you see the target (sometimes monsters will not even aggro and just get slayed because of the huge range of this spell). If you getting below half of arcane power OR start getting hits, activate diamond skin and continue disintegrate. Respawn hydra (cause it will soon disappear). If monsters not dead yet, use mirror image and step back. Continue shooting. If mirrors aren't helping or dead very quick, telepoooort!!! And repeat :)

For boss fights, I'm switching Convergence to Chaos Nexus. Everything else stays the same. Soon I will probably have to take bosses resistances into account though.

And btw, I one shot Diablo on Normal with this build!! Nightmare begins!!!

Wizard lvl 25 - profile

Just for the record, this is how my profile looks like right now:

With Magic Weapon buff :) Without it, damage is 10% less.

D3 Guest Pass key give away

I have quite a few D3 guest pass on hands. Figured, I'd start sharing so others can play :)

If you claimed this key, please post in the comments. I'll give away another one!

Wizard lvl 25 - Tornado Fest build

I'm currently using this build:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#UcXVTh21bYaaaaZ!Yc!aZZaaa

It's a lot of fun when you spin countless uncontrolled tornadoes! Here is how it works: run into enemies pack wearing two passive AOE spells (Arcane Orb with Arcane Orbit + Storm Armor), activate Diamond Skin (with Prism), spam tornadoes like crazy (Energy Twister with Mistral Breeze), finish off with Explosive Blast.

Due to reduced cost (by Prism and Mistral Breeze runes), you can actually spam tornadoes during the whole time of diamond skin duration and have enough mana for finishing move while heavily hitting melee with lightning bolts and arcane orbit explosions. If enemies are not dead, run away for DS cooldown, then repeat. However, with all yellow armor I got from auction I'm at about 460 damage (with 500% increase from intelligence), so usually everything dies after the first DS cooldown. One shot Belial today using this build!

Possible modifications: Magic Weapon instead of Explosive Blast (higher overall damage), Evocation instead of Prodigy (latter is useful to regenerate mana quicker while DS is on cooldown).

4 immediate hints for D3 beginners

And here is why I started this blog today: I learned a very important thing about the game which I'd love to have learned earlier. Well, if you are just starting, then consider yourself lucky - there goes hints for a new D3 player:

1. Enable "Show advanced tooltips" option ASAP. You can find it in Options -> Gameplay.
2. Enable "Display damage numbers" and other numbers if you like. Also available in Options -> Gameplay.
3. Start using Auction House ASAP, don't buy items from vendors or blacksmith
4. Focus on primary stat + gold early on. Don't salvage blue for essences - sell it. Don't build "Magic find" or "Health from globes" or any other stat - "Gold find" is best (early on). 

There are two base ideas behind these hints.

Firstly if you anywhere like me, it is super important to understand how your spells work and what's your damage throughput. Since game is item-centric, you need to know exactly how those items help to do more damage, so you can enjoy collecting items, improving your build and seeing the results.

Secondly, AH is a beast. Since there are tons of players going through Normal difficulty right now it's flooded with Rare items that are cheap and vastly better than what you can get from merchants. Even later on, when your blacksmith will start making rare items for you (after soaking thousands of gold for training) it's worse than AH, because there you will find all same items with a choice of stats that you need for a reasonable price. Thus my honest recommendation is to focus on gold mining and studying how AH works.

Enjoy your game!

It has begun!

It is out in a wild!! I can't express how exciting I'm to finally play Diablo III. And while playing is a lot of fun it comes with lots of learning and experimenting which I'm eager to share with fellow adventurers. Thus this blog was created. Hopefully I won't be lazy and post here at least few times a week :)

Blog author: Wizard lvl 25, playing normal difficulty atm.
Blog design: a bold TODO, drafted some random layout over awesome D3 wallpaper.
Blog language: English primarily since I'm playing on US server. Can do some posts in Russian occasionally.

See ya in hell!