Firebird Flame Blades Wizard Greater Rift Speed Farming Variation

The Firebird Flame Blades Wizard can deal excellently with Greater Rift Speed Farming, with versatile and unconditional damage at its disposal and great mobility offered by the Teleport-resetting powers of the Firebird set. We have solo speed GR rankings and solo speed T16 rankings if you want to know more about which builds are best for speed farming.

During lower tier Greater Rift farming, the balance between defense, damage and utility can be shifted to favor the latter two aspects of character building.

Active Skills
Spectral Blade Flame Blades Disintegrate Chaos Nexus 1 Explosive Blast Chain Reaction 2 Magic Weapon Deflection 3 Teleport Safe Passage 4 Black Hole Spellsteal
Passive Skills
Audacity Elemental Exposure Evocation Galvanizing Ward

When you are Speed Farming Greater Rifts, your playstyle should at least partially reflect the circumstances by focusing on massive pulls, generic bonuses against enemies and chaining pylon effects.

In GR speeds, you will basically be doing an accelerated version of the basic rotation. You will still put priority on establishing defenses first thing in the rift — channeling Disintegrate for stacks, activation of Magic Weapon Deflection, and hitting enemies with Explosive Blast for the Orb of Infinite Depth interaction. With that handled, you will simply alternate between Combustion stacks upkeep with Disintegrate, as well as its spread of the Ignition effect on enemies, and actually mowing them down with Spectral Blade. Manipulate your enemies into large pulls with Black Hole, and reposition smartly with Teleport — that's everything necessary in GR speed farm.

Parts of the skill and passive selection will overlap with the base Greater Rift progression build, but others will have to change according to the task at hand. Ability to burst down enemies quicker takes precedence.

Your entire active skill selection will match the base GR solo progression setup, with the interplay between Disintegrate Chaos Nexus and Spectral Blade Flame Blades forming the base of the build by ramping up Combustion stacks and bursting them down, respectively. You will augment this damage by taking Audacity and Elemental Exposure in your passives, as usual.

As a non-channeling fire-based skill in its own right, Explosive Blast Chain Reaction will bring its own damage value to the build, but it is largely taken for the Orb of Infinite Depth protective interaction.

The protection offered by Magic Weapon Deflection and Galvanizing Ward in conjunction with the worn Ashnagarr's Blood Bracer is too valuable to pass up, especially to keep the damage bonuses of Squirt's Necklace intact.

Pulls will hasten runs by a large margin, so Black Hole Spellsteal will still find a place on your bar, and the inclusion of Teleport Safe Passage is non-negotiable in speed farming, where mobility is a primary concern. To smooth out the uptime of both skills in quick farming runs, you will be taking Evocation as your final passive.

You will be equipping 5 pieces of the Firebird set, and will be adding the CDR and RCR utility of the craftable Cpt. Crimson set on top; of course, both sets will be complete via a Ring of Royal Grandeur in the Cube. Stat priorities will remain largely the same, with a focus on Toughness stats across gear, as well as Attack Speed and a smattering of Cooldown Reduction.

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 Trapped still bring excellent damage multiplication value to the build in speed farming; Gogok of Swiftness is also universally helpful with its Increased Attack Speed, Cooldown Reduction, and scaling Dodge bonuses.

Within the limited challenges of Speed Greater Rifts, Bane of the Stricken should be replaced by Bane of the Powerful for its well-rounded damage increase and damage mitigation bonuses; its limited duration should be of no consequence when you are demolishing the difficulty.

In Season 25, your helm and weapon sockets will be taken over by the supremely powerful Soul Shards. For this variant, we recommend the following.

• Helm — You can either focus on creating massive pulls and use Shard of Hatred with "You now deal 15% increased damage for every enemy instead of 10% (to a maximum of 150%)" as its Rank 3 power, or go for a more conservative route and bolster your Attack Speed by using Sliver of Terror with "Your Attack Speed and Critical Hit Chance are increased by 7% for each skill on cooldown." For optimization benefits, aim for Intelligence or Melee/Ranged Damage Reduction on its Rank 2 roll.
• Weapon — Both Remnant of Pain with "When you critically hit an enemy, you increase the Attack Speed of all players by 5% for 5 seconds. Max 10 stacks" and Essence of Anguish with "When you deal Poison damage to an enemy, they receive 50% increased Poison damage from all sources for 10 seconds" as their Rank 3 power are perceived as viable choices. Note that if you opt to use Remnant of Pain, you will have to incorporate a source of hard crowd control in the build; a solid example would be to exchange Magic Weapon for Frost Nova Bone Chill. For optimization benefits, aim for Weapon Damage Increase or Fire Skill Damage Increase on its Rank 2 roll.

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

With Elite and Rift Guardian fights being much less of a threat and bottleneck in Speed Greater Rifts, you should replace our base build recommendation of The Furnace for the attack- and movement speed amplifier Echoing Fury.

As this remains a Spectral Blade-centric build when it comes to delivering the bulk of your damage, The Shame of Delsere is still a crucial part of the build that simply gets moved off the worn pieces and into the armor slot of the Cube.

As previously mentioned, in order to tie the set bonuses of Firebird and Cpt. Crimson together, you will have to put Ring of Royal Grandeur in the jewelry slot of the Cube.

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.

The recommended follower for this build during GR speed farming is the Enchantress, due to her increased attack speed bonuses (helpful for the attack speed breakpoint-reliant methods of dealing damage in this build) via Focused Mind, as well as the elemental damage bonus from Amplification and damage reduction from Powered Shield.

For more information regarding followers, we advise you to read our Follower Guide, which contains detailed advice for choosing the skills and the gear of your follower.

Your recommended potion is Bottomless Potion of the Unfettered, which renders you immune to Crowd Control effects for a brief time after consuming it — valuable bonus to a build that lacks means to break away from CC outside of straight up evasion via teleporting.