Act 4 Inferno Elites & Diablo with Critical Mass Battlemage Wizard Energy Twister Windup Build

Unstable Anomaly

"It takes perfect concentration for a wizard to dance on the edge of infinity. Never be the one to break that concentration." —One-Eye Whipple

The Windup build encourages aggressive play on the precipice of huge kills versus complete failure while surrounded by big packs of enemies in order to keep the combo going.

In testing build variations for Inferno Act 4 death always occured when overwhelmed without time to respond, either due to the Teleport cooldown being a few tenths of a second away or server lag. This gave me the idea to try a new passive, Unstable Anomaly, that allows an automatic knockback to all enemies once every 60 seconds if life drops below 20%.

This turned out to be a fun choice that matches with the "infinity edge dance" flavor of the build. You can see this in action at 3:40 in the video where it offers a clutch save from near-certain death.

Gear Switch for Izual

If you don't have CC reduction while battling Izual you'll be frozen constantly. He'll go down quicker if you switch out a piece of gear for decreased control impairment. The optimal piece to combine with Dark Mage's Shade is the fairly inexpensive Gladiator Gauntlets. In playtesting gear variations in Acts 2 & 3 the Gauntlets are strong all-around if used instead of opting for CC reduction in the helm or with a slower weapon that gets less twisters off before CC impairing effects kick back in.

Oops

There's one death during the Shadow Clone phase. I made the mistake of deciding to teleport away and kite her. The far better option is to go right up and aggressively facesmash as you would for any other enemy as shown in the 2nd attempt.

Frozen Fast Shielding Teleporter

The shielding Hell Witches that start at 2:05 were the toughest battle. I ended up pulling them towards more mobs to Windup on while sticking close to them for Frost/Blast with Teleport because I couldn't get enough Wicked Wind crits in with them constantly shielding or teleporting. 

Build

Energy Twister / Wicked Wind, Diamond Skin / Crystal Shell, Frost Nova / Bone Chill, Explosive Blast / Chain Reaction, Teleport / Fracture, Energy Armor / Prismatic Armor, Critical Mass, Unstable Anomaly, Temporal Flux

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#VOYXhQ!hgU!.ccacY

Comments

[GreenZerg]

Hi,

After reading your post and trying it out with my current Arc Orb gear in act 1, I decided that this was somewhere around 100 times more fun to play than the standard shoot kite kite kite shoot kite kite kite shoot kite kite kite die build id been playing.
so I decided to drop my entire fortune of 15million on new gear.

Im at work so unable to show you my exact pieces, however I can list some stats (with Prismatic Armour)
35k HP
5.5k Armour
700 All Resist
38% Crit
160% Crit Damage
25K Damage
26 AP on Crit
500 Life On Hit

Using 780dps wand with 10AP on crit along with some vitality and socket (with star emerald)

Any advice on what I should look to improve stat wise? I think almost all of my pieces are pretty good now and would require a decent amount of gold 5mil + to think of upgrading.

I now feel pretty invincible and can obviously destroy act1, and make decent progress in act3, meaning I can tank and kill azmodan, cydae and most elite packs. however I have trouble against arcane sentry in particular, I can live through it in act1, but in act3 its still killing me very fast, is the only real option to dodge it with teleport?

Also in act 3 have a lot of trouble with mobs that run away and separate themselves. Is the best thing to do here, teleport in and frost nova before using wicked wind, to force them to stick together and hopefully keep them permanently frozen then?

Also just so you know Cold Blooded does increase ALL damage against chilled targets so I would look at swapping that in for unstable anomoly, or maybe glass cannon/blur if you really think you need it.

Thanks for saving Diablo 3 for me, was getting kind of bored with the game but now i love it more than ever!
Nick