Tal Meteor Wizard Greater Rift Speed Farming Variation
Greater Rift Speed Farming
The Tal Meteor Wizard can deal
reasonably well with Greater Rift Speed Farming, with the ability to wipe
entire screen's worth of enemies with the Meteor barrage. 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 |
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Passive Skills |
Adapting Rotation
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.
The build will maintain the vast majority of the GR progression playstyle
(four stacks of Tal Rasha from four skills of different elements, using
Meteor to decimate the entire pull, etc.), but shifts to a faster and
more aggressive mindset. The build is very easy on the micro, as it sports
three semi-passive buffs in its "active" skills:
Storm Armor
Power of the Storm,
Familiar
Icicle and
Magic Weapon
Deflection. These 10-minute buffs will keep you safe
throughout the rift, and proc half of the elemental requirements (Lightning
and Cold) of the Tal Rasha set. To assist your heavy Arcane Power spending,
you should apply
Diamond Skin
Prism as soon as it comes off cooldown.
Teleport
Calamity will serve double duty as a method of repositioning,
as well as proccing the Arcane portion of Tal Rasha. Naturally, your damage
will come from
Meteor, which you should hurl with reckless abandon on
top of your enemies' heads.
Adapting Skills
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.
- The Fire Tal Rasha Proc, as well as your main damage dealer, is found in
Meteor. Swap to the unruned version, which befits speed farming content; you still get the benefits of the
Meteor Shower rune from the Cubed
Mempo of Twilight.
- The Lightning Tal Rasha proc will come from
Storm Armor. It is also taken for the massive damage reduction of
Halo of Karini, and you can assist your frivolous resource spending in speed GRs with the
Power of the Storm rune. You will further solidify your resource management with
Diamond Skin
Prism.
- The Arcane Tal Rasha proc will be taken care of by
Teleport
Calamity, which also doubles as a mobility tool.
- The Cold Tal Rasha proc will come from
Familiar
Icicle. The skill also adds a minor, automated source of crowd control, which can prove useful at times.
Magic Weapon
Deflection will provide an additional shielding buffer, necessary to safeguard your
Squirt's Necklace buff (see Cube section below).
- In the passives, you should keep
Audacity (proximity-based damage multiplication),
Elemental Exposure (element-based damage multiplication), and
Illusionist (
Teleport resets) from the GR progression spec, as they retain their usefulness. You should, however, avoid overkilling on damage and drop
Arcane Dynamo. In its stead, use
Galvanizing Ward: a shielding passive, which lends itself well to overpowering the content in GR speeds.
Adapting Gear
The Tal Rasha's Elements set
remains gloriously adaptable in GR speeds, and you should largely keep the
same split between pieces as you do in Greater Rift solo progression: 5 pieces
of Tal's, plus utility inclusions. It is recommended that you keep wearing the
2 pieces of the craftable Aughild set ( Aughild's Power and
Aughild's Search), as they still produce valuable damage increasing and
damage reducing properties.
Utility slots can also vary according to your overall strength, as well as
whether you play solo or in a group — as you have to take care of
certain bonuses that are usually relegated to the follower yourself when
partying up. The bracer and shoulder slots — usually occupied by Aughild
pieces — can also be taken by Ranslor's Folly (for supremely
strong, pixel-tight pulling effect you can exert over trash mobs), and either
the Act I bounty cache legendary
Pauldrons of the Skeleton King (for the
extra cheat death proc in solo play), or
Homing Pads (for the safety
during town portal when partying up). In order to make this combo viable
however, you will need to use
Energy Twister
Wicked Wind over
Diamond Skin
Prism, making resource management considerably harder.
Still, you gain supremely strong, on-demand CC from the
Ranslor's Folly
pulls, which can make all the difference in your GR speed clears.
In your jewelry, you should keep Halo of Karini for the ubiquitous
damage reduction it provides, as well as the damage multiplication
Convention of Elements — though you can consider dropping the
latter for a Fire damage
Stone of Jordan, if you prefer a consistent (if
weaker) bonus over a timing-sensitive one. Use
Squirt's Necklace as your
amulet; its damage multiplication bonus will be safeguarded by the stacking
shields of
Magic Weapon
Deflection and
Galvanizing Ward.
Similarly to the Greater Rift solo progression setup, your weapon needs to
stay on the Meteor-dedicated legendary staff
The Grand Vizier.
Slot | Pieces | Stat Priority |
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Head |
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Shoulders |
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Torso |
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Wrists |
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Hands |
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Waist |
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Legs |
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Feet |
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Amulet |
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Ring #1 |
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Ring #2 |
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Weapon |
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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: Paragon Cap
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.
Season 29: Gearing Considerations
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.
Adapting Gems
Both Esoteric Alteration and
Bane of the Trapped still bring
excellent damage reduction and damage multiplication bonuses, respectively.
Within the limited challenges of Speed Greater Rifts,
Bane of the Stricken should be replaced by
Bane of the Powerful for
a well-rounded damage increase and damage mitigation bonus, with a
duration-based (but very generous and manageable) limitation.
Slot | Gems |
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Jewelry | |
Helm |
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Torso and Pants |
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Weapon |
For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.
Adapting Kanai's Cube
Considering its massive damage multiplication and taunting property,
The Smoldering Core is still a mandatory inclusion in Greater Rift speed
farming as well.
Moved from the equipped pieces to the Cube in order to free up a slot for
Squirt's, Mempo of Twilight is nevertheless a mandatory inclusion for
the tremendous damage bonuses and rune advantages it provides to
Meteor.
In order to maintain the amalgamation of the Tal Rasha and Aughild sets, as
well as a slew of synergistic legendary items, you need to keep the
Ring of Royal Grandeur in the jewelry slot of the Cube.
Follower
The recommended follower for this build during GR speed farming is the
Enchantress, due to her cooldown reduction bonus (cutting down
Teleport downtime) and elemental damage increase. Note that this
requires that you run
Hand of the Prophet and optimize her survivability,
as per our guide.
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.
Legendary Potion
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.
Changelog
- 13 Sep. 2023: Added Season 29 Paragon Cap and Gearing recommendations.
- 22 Feb. 2023: Added Season 28 Altar of Rites recommendations.
- 26 Aug. 2022: Guide added, as well as Season 27 Angelic Crucible recommendations.
More Wizard Guides
Builds from Other Classes
Farming Guides
This build is presented to you by Deadset, one of the very few professional Diablo 3 players. Deadset regularly publishes video guides on Youtube and streams on Twitch, where you can see how this and other builds play out in practice.
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