I am trying to beat Diablo on Inferno with the following build:

Force Armor
Venom Hydra
Magic Missile (Seeker)
Diamond Skin (Crystal)
Mirror Image (Duplicates)
Teleport (Wormhole)

The strategy is really to just stay alive with the last three skills while letting venom hydra do the work and spamming magic missile when I have some freedom.

It is kind of working, as in I can stay alive for decent amounts of time but eventually end up dying.

Any tips?

what passives are you using?

You could try fracture instead of wormhole for tele, and what are your stats like? like LoH Hp and stuff

Fracture wouldn't really help since enemies tend to ignore the duplicates, so you're better off staying with Wormhole as a GTFO button. Depending on what passives or gear you have on, you could try using Blizzard instead of Mirror Image for some more DPS

I forget the name of the passive but the one that charges upon successful hits to give the following spell a 70% bonus to the following spell really works well. Especially with the homing missel. I've been using it with arcane orb and the venom hydra.

Frost nova will cancel any of his attacks, but without a CM build you can't cast it too often. Depending on which attacks are usually hitting you this might be good.

I found teleport-fracture to be very helpful. If your mirror images are working well, alternating these will give you nearly constant mimics.

As ppg3 said, Arcane Dynamo will be incredibly helpful since you're relying on the hydra for DPS.

question, does blizzard crit? i heard hydra does, but i've never seen blizzard crit

@anuiran thanks for the reply... i don't think i've ever seen it crit... but then again, ever since i got some crit gear and changed by skills, i haven't used blizzard.... maybe i'll give it another shot and double check

Posted by shniggies at 08/08/2012 11:39 PM

@anuiran thanks for the reply... i don't think i've ever seen it crit... but then again, ever since i got some crit gear and changed by skills, i haven't used blizzard.... maybe i'll give it another shot and double check

Some DoT spells can crit without showing it. I know disintegrate does but I'm not sure if blizzard functions in the same way. With disint the damage numbers show once a second I believe. The actual damage is happening faster than that (let's say twice per second, I forget the actual amount). If you get 1 crit and 1 non-crit, the damage tick will be white, even though the extra damage is in there.

thanks... i've switched to a cm/ww build and was trying to mix in some AOE, but its been working well so far...
question... can you crit off invulnerables? or does it not even count as damage since they're invulnerable?
they own me...

sorry, didn't mean to thread jack...
with a kite build, you would really need to be mobile, hopefully you have some +movement speed
also, i think crystal shell won't buy you much against diablo, so you may want to switch that out for something else like frost nova, you can freeze him and run away

Posted by shniggies at 08/08/2012 11:25 PM

question, does blizzard crit? i heard hydra does, but i've never seen blizzard crit

Yes it does. Like Anuiran says, every skill can crit, the way described by sabin.
BUT :
A crit does not automagically mean a CM cooldown reduction.
Every Skill has something called a "proc ratio", a specific chance of producing external effects like "Stun/Freeze/Immobilize/Chill/etc on Hit" item procs or similar skill-induced effects (Magic Weapon with the knockback rune for example but also the cooldown recution from CM !), but also the ratio of effectiveness of more analogic effects like Life on Hit, Steal Life, etc...
Some skills have very good proc ratio (1 or near) and others are abysmal (big bad 0)
Basically, the rule of thumb is :
- monotarget skills have a ratio near 1
- multitarget skills have a ratio of 1 / (expected average number of target for that skill)
- dots have lower ratios

Notables Examples :
basic Missiles have a ratio of 1
Blizzard and Wicked Wind have low but non-null ratios
Frost Nova : 10%
Hydras have a null ratio.

Posted by shniggies at 08/13/2012 02:08 PM

thanks... i've switched to a cm/ww build and was trying to mix in some AOE, but its been working well so far...
question... can you crit off invulnerables? or does it not even count as damage since they're invulnerable?
they own me...

(this quote is part of the reason why i talk about proc ratios just before, it will be of use i believe)
Yes you can crit off Invulnerable Minions. You can even freeze them. They are no threat to CM builds, basically.
However, you can neither crit nor freeze Shielding elites (while shielded). Stack some vita, resall and life regen per second for them, because THEY are the threat.

btw, i just beat diablo inferno some days ago with the help of another wiz and a dh.
Well, Diablo himself is quite laughable, the really difficult part was the shadow clones of phase 2, because they did an awful lot of damages with their pair of arcanic orbs and the dh OS-arrow they throw at us right when they spawn. Its basically an instawipe of the team.
At this point, obligatory disclaimer : i had a quite unbalanced gear (16k dps, 36% crit chance, 24% ASI, 19 ap/crit, ~9% item procs (freeze/stun), 600 loh, 7k armor*, 550 res all* ; * with Prismatic Armor and with a shield) aimed at freezing almost anything but also a bit fragile compared to the second wiz which was two to three times more durable/resilient (much higher vita and resall) in fight but clearly lacking when it comes to freezing things still.
So we just switched to a very tanky build : the idea was to evade the two orbs and the arrow (or at least 2 of them) while beginning a double ww/nova loop. So we chose the time dilatation skill with the 10% AS increase rune in order to both reduce drastically the projectiles speed so that we could evade them and at the same time maxing out our AS to perfect the permafreeze of the double CM/nova loops.
It worked, and luckily Diablo reappeared right in the ww spot of the dead clones and got permafreeze up till the phase 3 (which was a joke, like phase 1).

Hope it will help somebody.

Nilat's post above is definitely worth the read if anyone is unfamiliar with exactly how often critical mass lowers cool downs, or how often LoH occurs with certain spells. Great info.

@nilat thanks for the info, its very informative
so basically fast + shielding = death? :D
i know they're revamping this affix, but im wondering what i can do in the meantime...
i got rid of my +movement boots and opted for more resist (since i wasn't really kiting anymore) but if i can't leech off shields, then what is a poor man supposed to do?!

Its the build i use =P

Posted by shniggies at 08/14/2012 05:38 PM

@nilat thanks for the info, its very informative
so basically fast + shielding = death? :D
i know they're revamping this affix, but im wondering what i can do in the meantime...

Shielding is almost always in the worst affix combos. There are some exceptions like Horde and Arcane Enchanted (I ran into this in Inferno Whimsy :-\).
Currently playing as a CM/WW, shielding is still the worst affix but it's not bad once you get them perma-frozen (teleport away if shielding comes up, repeat).