Explosive Blast Farming Wizard Greater Rifting Variation

The 'Flashfire' Explosive Blast Wizard has limited ability to progress into high end Greater Rifts, falling off heavily around GR75. Fortunately, this is also the highest point generally required for Seasonal Journey completion, so you can easily complete the Season's checklist by making a few variations on the farming build.

Considering the scaling difficulty of Greater Rift levels (about 18% per tier), you will need to introduce means of damage and protection that do not hinge on quick kill speed, as it invariably slows down.

Active Skills
Electrocute Surge of Power Teleport Calamity 1 Frost Nova Frozen Mist 2 Explosive Blast Chain Reaction 3 Diamond Skin Enduring Skin 4 Magic Weapon Deflection
Passive Skills
Illusionist Galvanizing Ward Audacity Evocation

Since you will be pushing your damage output limits, a primary will be necessary to trigger half of the Focus and Restraint set damage bonus. In GRs specifically, the rune Surge of Power will also be necessary as a generator to keep up the damage reduction from a cubed Aquila Cuirass.

When pushing the limits of the build in GRs, one of your utility slots will be taken by Magic Weapon for the hefty shield provided by the Deflection rune, in turn doubled by Ashnagarr's Blood Bracer. The other will be taken by Diamond Skin Enduring Skin for the additional protection, reaching near perfect overlap with the Cooldown Reduction focus of the build.

In Greater Rifts, take Galvanizing Ward over Elemental Exposure: amped by Ashnagarr's Blood Bracer, this passive doubles your toughness with an absorption shield every time you stay unharmed for 5 seconds — a generously low requirement that you will refresh often as you maneuver through a Rift.

When pushing this build to its GR limits, you will attain the full power of Tal Rasha's Elements set by equipping 6 of the 7 available pieces (preferably skipping Tal Rasha's Unwavering Glare). The CDR breakpoint you will be striving to reach with perfected gear is 59%, which offers the best balance between Toughness and Diamond Skin availability in Greater Rifts (at this breakpoint, your Enduring Skin downtime will be less than a second).

If you followed the skill recommendations above, you have also dropped Unstable Anomaly's cheat death. You can make up that drop of toughness by introducing two pieces of the Firebird set that do not conflict with Tal Rasha, Firebird's Pinions and Firebird's Tarsi. Their combined power adds the missing cheat death to the build.

In non- Goldwrap content like Greater Rifts, it is recommended to take Ashnagarr's Blood Bracer to double the potency of your shields — a great addition to the fragile Tal Rasha builds. This bracer allows the overlap of Enduring Skin, provides twice the shield from Deflection, and doubles the absorption from Galvanizing Ward.

To help you with farming the gear you need for your builds, we have two very useful guides that you can access by clicking the links below: a Salvage Guide to help you quickly check whether or not you can safely salvage a piece of gear and a Legendary Farming Guide to help you efficiently farm legendaries and set items.

Bane of the Stricken will replace Boon of the Hoarder in the Greater Rift setup. Building up your damage multiplicatively in prolonged fights and with a level 25 bonus specifically targeting Rift Guardians, this gem is designed to assist AoE heavy builds in their struggle against single target, high HP enemies. Flashfire Wizards can be considered part of that group, making the inclusion of this gem necessary.

For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.

In the weapon Cube slot, In-geom should be replaced by The Furnace as soon as you stop chaining the cooldown reduction bonus from one elite to the next (usually shortly after GR65). The Furnace provides 50% additional elite damage which speeds up higher GR clear times greatly, as Champion and Rift Guardian fights are the usual bottleneck.

Since gold does not drop in GRs, Goldwrap is out of the armor Cube slot. In its stead, Aquila Cuirass will halve incoming damage as long as Arcane Power does not dip below 90% of its reserve, which has a very high uptime in the non- In-geom GR variation.

In Greater Rifts, your jewelry slot will be best taken by Convention of Elements; the ring rotates through all elements available to Wizards, not only thematically matching the Tal Rasha set, but also providing a massive bonus to your main damage dealer during the Fire proc (which you will need to learn and time to maximize your damage).

In Season 22, you will still be able to take In-geom during lower Greater Rift farming, which the build strives for. The CDR proc of the weapon greatly improves clear times as long as you maintain a decent elite kill speed.

The Kanai's Cube can be used for much more than simply extracting Legendary powers from items. Please refer to our Kanai's Cube guide for more information.