Tal Meteor Wizard BiS Gear, Gems, and Paragon Points

With the flexibility afforded by the seven available pieces of the Tal Rasha set and the Ring of Royal Grandeur, you will be able to take five Tal's set pieces, mix in an additional set into the build, and still fit extra legendaries. In Greater Rifts, this additional set will be Aughild's Authority, attaining its bonuses by wearing Aughild's Power and Aughild's Search. Note that this is a craftable set at the Blacksmith in town, making perfecting its rolls a somewhat easier task. A suggested split between the sets is listed below, though you can vary the pieces according to your preference and best rolls, as long as you maintain the required 5 Tal's — 2 Aughild's set pieces combination, along with RoRG in the Cube.

Rolls-wise this precise, nuke-oriented build will benefit greatly from Skill Damage and Area Damage affixes, alongside the usual stacking of Crit-related stats. High Crit Chance and Crit Damage are needed on the gloves, alongside Intelligence and Area Damage. Meteor % damage can roll on helm and boots, so obtain it on both; the former will also include an Attack Speed roll (innate stat on Mempo of Twilight). The pants, belt and chest should be largely Toughness slots. Arcane damage, double Crit stats and an open Socket are BiS on the amulet.

With your amulet slot occupied by Tal's, your best way to finish off jewelry is to split between offense and defense in the rings with the combination of Convention of Elements and Halo of Karini. Convention of Elements boosts your elemental damage in cycles according to the elements available to your class, so you need to internalize its rotation and be ready with your pulls for the Arcane cycle, when you should burst enemies down. Halo of Karini offers massive damage reduction that is just about non-negotiable, and has the modest requirement of keeping your Storm Armor active and keeping distance from the enemy. Note that if you want to introduce more tankiness to the build, either due to playing Hardcore or inexperience with the playstyle, you can drop CoE for the added safety of Unity, coupled with another on the follower plus an immortality relic for them (i.e. Enchanting Favor). This will cut incoming damage in half.

A trio of Meteor-specific items make up the remainder of your gear. Buffed in Patch 2.7.4, Mempo of Twilight now applies the Meteor Shower rune to all casted Meteors, and multiples their damage. Nilfur's Boast is a Meteor build mainstay, further multiplying the skill's damage, and empowering it against singular targets — a massive boon against Rift Guardians. Finally, the mandatory weapon for the build is The Grand Vizier — a two-handed legendary staff that reduces the Arcane Power cost of Meteor in half, and, once again, greatly multiplies its damage. Note that unlike its fixed Resource Cost Reduction bonus, the damage multiplication is of variable strength — and try to get as good of a roll as you can.

For Offense stats, try to obtain Meteor % bonus on the helm and boots (maximum of 30%), Arcane elemental damage on the amulet and wrists (maximum of 40%), Crit Chance and Crit Damage within a 1:10 ratio (ideally over 45% and 450%, respectively), and Area Damage of 150%+.

For Defense stats, aim for a life pool of 800k+; dropping as much as you can for offense as you grow accustomed to the build. You will mostly sustain through your follower, so you will not be focusing on regenerative rolls on gear.

All augmentations on gear should be done with your main stat, Intelligence.

Note that the stat suggestions below portray an ideally rolled item with stats listed in relative order of importance. The first four of them are main stats, and the latter two — secondary stats. If your item lacks and is unable to be rerolled into the primary stats outlined below, especially for a stat higher on the list, strongly consider its replacement. Perfecting Secondary stats is mostly a case of hyper-optimization and is not a case for discarding an item, except where noted.

Slot	Pieces	Stat Priority
Head	Mempo of Twilight	Intelligence Socket Meteor % Damage Attack Speed Crowd Control Duration Reduction (Secondary Stat) Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat)
Shoulders	Aughild's Power	Intelligence Area Damage Resource Cost Reduction Vitality Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat) Health Globe Healing Bonus (Secondary Stat)
Torso	Tal Rasha's Relentless Pursuit	Intelligence 3 Sockets Vitality Elite Damage Reduction Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat) Melee or Missile Damage Reduction (Secondary Stat)
Wrists	Aughild's Search	Intelligence Critical Hit Chance Arcane % Damage Vitality Reduced Damage Melee Attacks (Secondary stat)
Hands	Tal Rasha's Grasp	Intelligence (or Resource Cost Reduction at high Paragon) Critical Hit Chance Critical Hit Damage Area Damage Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat)
Waist	Tal Rasha's Brace	Intelligence Vitality Armor Life % Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat) Life per Kill (Secondary Stat)
Legs	Tal Rasha's Stride	Intelligence 2 Sockets Vitality Armor Pickup Radius (Secondary Stat) Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat)
Feet	Nilfur's Boast	Intelligence Meteor % Damage Vitality Armor Pickup Radius (Secondary Stat) Health Globe Healing Bonus (Secondary Stat)
Amulet	Tal Rasha's Allegiance	Socket Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Arcane % Damage Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat) Melee or Missile Damage Reduction (Secondary Stat)
Ring #1	Convention of Elements	Socket Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Area Damage Crowd Control Duration Reduction (Secondary Stat) Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat)
Ring #2	Halo of Karini	Socket Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Area Damage Crowd Control Duration Reduction (Secondary Stat) Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat)
Weapon	The Grand Vizier	High Weapon Damage Socket (preferably from Ramaladni's Gift) Intelligence (or % Damage at high Paragons) Area Damage Life per Kill (Secondary Stat)

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.

Season 29 introduces a season-specific cap to stat benefits from Paragon levels, all while updating how Paragon point distribution is handled. For the duration of this Season, you can only assign 800 Paragon stat points to your character, removing the long-standing practice of main-stat stacking (with some gearing implications — see below) after you reach Paragon 800.

On top of that, you could only allocate 50 Paragon stat points to each of the four stats in a given Paragon category (Core, Offense, Defense, and Utility). In Season 29, you can allocate up to the full 200 points per category into any attribute, allowing you to more easily reach necessary build breakpoints (as outlined in the Gear page of the guide) for Cooldown Reduction, Resource Cost Reduction, etc.

With the changes to Paragon in mind, we recommend using the following Paragon distribution for this build:

• Core: Movement Speed: 200 points.
• Offense: Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage: Allocate points so they are as close to the desirable 1:10 ratio between the two stats, as displayed in your Character Details sheet. For weapon-and-offhand builds, this is usually achieved with the full 200 points spent into Critical Hit Damage.
• Defense: Life and All Resistance: Allocate points to maximize survivability; for Wizards, this is usually achieved by evenly splitting 100 points into Life (directly increasing your Health pool) and Armor (to complement the naturally high All Resistance stat of Intelligence-based characters).
• Utility: Area Damage: 200 points.

In terms of gear, keeping the Paragon cap in mind is paramount, as it stymies the traditional endless supply of main stat after Paragon 800. This means re-rolling mainstat off your gear is no longer desirable, and full equipment augmentation with your main stat is even more critical. Additionally, you should take a careful look at your build and consider if you can fit the following changes to strengthen your damage and survivability:

• Guardian's Jeopardy: This is a craftable armor set, and the recipe for its creation drops from Bounty farming. Guardian's 2-piece provides a decent damage reduction bonus, but the true powerhouse of the set is the 3-piece bonus, which nets you an additional 100% of your main stats from equipped items. This is a tremendous benefit in an 800 Paragon capped Season. If the Guardian set can fit into the build with minimal sacrifices (other craftable sets, tertiary damage multipliers, etc.), consider its implementation. The available pieces are Guardian's Aversion (Wrists), Guardian's Case (Waist), and Guardian's Gaze (Head). Of course, you can wear 2 pieces of the set and complete the full 3-piece bonus with a Ring of Royal Grandeur (found from Act I bounty caches).
• Endless Walk:This is a jewelry set consisting of The Traveler's Pledge (Amulet) and The Compass Rose (Ring), and is randomly found through farming, gambling Blood Shards, and/or Kanai's Cube recipes. The Endless Walk set is a nice compromise between damage bonuses (building up while stationary) and defensive bonuses (building up while moving). It can replace glass cannon choices like the Bastions of Will set ( Focus and Restraint) and Squirt's Necklace with acceptable losses to DPS.
• Unity: A character wearing this ring, along with another Unity on their follower plus an immortality relic for them (i.e., Enchanting Favor), will reduce their damage taken by 50%. Unity can roll excellent offense-oriented stats and has an innate Extra Damage to Elites roll, which somewhat offsets losing all-out offense jewelry.

In the Core section, max out Movement Speed to the 25% cap. Normally this is done by dumping the first 50 Core Paragon points into Movement Speed, but if your boots have an imperfect roll with Movement Speed as a stat that you cannot replace, adjust the necessary point investment accordingly by simply subtracting your roll from the 25% max. Then, max out Arcane Power — the damage of Star Pact scales off AP spent. After that dump as much as you comfortably can into Intelligence, but feel free to invest into Vitality if you feel yourself lacking in toughness.

In the Offense section, max out Crit Damage, Crit Chance, Cooldown Reduction and Attack Speed in that order. In Defense, prioritize Armor, then Life %, then All Resistance, and finish off with Life Regeneration. In Utility, build up Area Damage and Resource Cost Reduction first, then finish off with Life on Hit and Globe Radius.

Slot	Paragon Points
Core	Movement Speed up to 25% cap Maximum Arcane Power (important stat) Intelligence Vitality (up to personal preference)
Offense	Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Cooldown Reduction Attack Speed
Defense	Armor Life % All Resistance Life Regeneration
Utility	Area Damage Resource Cost Reduction Life on Hit Globe Radius

Bane of the Trapped is the staple gem of the build; a potent source of additional damage, as it is its own multiplier in your total damage calculation. The gem procs itself with its level 25 property, as well as various other sources of crowd control in your and your follower's builds.

Esoteric Alteration brings a massive defensive bulwark to the build, reducing non-Physical damage by an amount scaling with the gem's level. The most threatening attacks in Greater Rifts are the elemental affixes of the various Elite enemies you encounter, so the reduction of non-Physical damage is of highest importance. This gem further amplifies your elemental resistances with its level 25 property, which triggers when you get damaged below 50% of your health pool — a frequent enough scenario in high Greater Rift progression.

Introduced in Season 4, Bane of the Stricken occupies the third and final jewelry socket. 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 during Greater Rift progression attempts.

When it comes to gear gems, you will start out progression by slotting the highest available level of Topazes in the chest and pants sockets. Ideally, these will all be Flawless Royal Topaz as soon as possible. As you grow in Paragon (bulking up Intelligence in the Core section) and aim for higher tier and more dangerous GRs, you will transition those gems into the defensive Flawless Royal Ruby (Intelligence-based classes such as the Wizard are naturally high in Resistances, so their protection scales better with improving Armor instead). There is no specific breakpoint where you do that; the rule of thumb is to make the change as soon as you feel the lack of toughness impede your progress. Since this is a Resource-intensive build, we recommend a Flawless Royal Topaz in the helm. In your weapon, use Flawless Royal Emerald for the Crit Damage boost.

Slot	Gems
Jewelry	Bane of the Trapped Esoteric Alteration Bane of the Stricken
Helm	Flawless Royal Topaz (Resource Cost Reduction)
Torso and Pants	Flawless Royal Topaz (Damage) Flawless Royal Ruby (Toughness)
Weapon	Flawless Royal Emerald

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

Tucked away in the Cube, The Smoldering Core provides essential powers for Meteor-based builds. Its luring effect does pretty much what it says on the tin — enemies are drawn (Taunted) to the impact areas of your Meteor casts. The stacking damage debuff ("consecutive hits against an enemy increase in damage") has a 5-second duration, refreshed on re-application. It produces a separate damage multiplier in your total damage calculation, and builds up to 500% extra damage on top. These effects combined make this item an essential legendary effect for the build.

To counteract your resource pool depletion, you will be using The Shame of Delsere in the Cube, which augments your Signature Spells with a massive Arcane Power restoration angle.

For the jewelry Cube slot, you will need to use the Ring of Royal Grandeur in order to tie the Tal Rasha and Aughild sets together. This cache legendary ring from Act I bounties reduces the number of worn items required for set bonus completion by one, allowing for the set amalgamation described above.

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.

For Greater Rift progression with this build, we recommend the Templar for his essential heal and cheat death abilities. The Templar is a preferable choice due to the lacking sustain in this build, as well as the overall lackluster cheat death passive that Wizards have.

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.

The preferred potions for this build are Bottomless Potion of Kulle-Aid (allowing you to break down Waller affixes that impede Frozen Orb DPS), Bottomless Potion of the Unfettered (giving you a brief window of CC immunity to counter your lack of CC-breaking or immunity skills), or Bottomless Potion of the Tower (whose Armor-increasing properties complement the naturally high All Resistances stat of Wizards). Pick whichever you feel helps you out the most.