Typhon Frost Hydra Wizard Nephalem Rift Speed Farming Variation
Nephalem Rift Speed Farming and Bounties
The Typhon Hydra Wizard
can deal reasonably well with Nephalem Rift Speed Farming, mostly thanks to
overwhelming damage potential offered by Hydras that allows you to
include
Aether Walker in the build. 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.
Within the limited scope of regular difficulties, the necessary damage and toughness to triumph over the enemy is significantly smaller. Thus, your best course of action is to improve utility and speed.
Adapting Skills for Nephalem T16 Rifts
Active Skills |
---|
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Passive Skills |
When you are speed farming regular rifts, parts of your playstyle will adapt to the lowered challenge and focus more on speed and utility.
The vital duality of your rotation from the GR setups — dropping
Blizzard on top of enemies to get the
Winter Flurry buff going
and summoning two
Hydras to obliterate the pull — is still the
bread and butter of the build. In T16 farm, said pulls will be assisted by two
skills;
Teleport
Wormhole to move across the map, and
Black Hole
Absolute Zero to draw enemies into a clump for the
Hydra's ease. Since you can easily overkill on defense, you will drop
the
Storm Armor and
Halo of Karini combo and
Magic Weapon
Deflection for a more tame, utility-driven combination of
Familiar
Arcanot (to make up for the loss of a generator skill, which
is too slow to use in T16s), and
Energy Armor (for a reasonable
protective layer in combination with
Ashnagarr's Blood Bracer, plus a
smattering of extra damage with the
Pinpoint Barrier rune).
In the passives, you will maintain Galvanizing Ward to safeguard
your
Squirt's Necklace bonus, and
Elemental Exposure for the
decent damage bonus to this varied elemental build. However you should swap
Audacity for its distanced counterpart
Power Hungry, and ditch
the
Arcane Dynamo buildup bonuses (too slow for T16 farm) for a safety
net against burst damage in the form of
Unstable Anomaly.
Adapting Skills for Bounties
Active Skills |
---|
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Passive Skills |
During Bounties, your utmost priority is the ability to cross over great distances, while maintaining some safety in a group game where everyone splits to do different tasks across the map — the so-called "split bounties", which is the optimal behavior for Bounty farming.
Pre-casting Blizzard on enemies' heads to trigger
Winter Flurry damage buff and casting the two
Hydras to
demolish your enemies remains the core of the rotation. It should be noted
that in Bounties, you can viably alternate to
Lightning Hydra, trading
off the Frost's AoE for improved single target damage (arguably good for Act
Bosses during bounties). As a Wizard, a measure of defense is still required
even in T16 bounties, so
Magic Weapon
Deflection is kept from the
progression build, and
Storm Armor still makes an appearance —
although with the speed-oriented
Scramble rune. The need for speed is
also reflected in
Teleport
Wormhole, as well as the exclusion of a
primary attack in favor of the passive Arcane Power gain from
Familiar
Arcanot.
In the passives, you will maintain Galvanizing Ward to safeguard
your
Squirt's Necklace bonus, but should exchange
Audacity for
its distanced counterpart
Power Hungry.
Illusionist will
replace
Elemental Exposure to further improve your mobility.
Unstable Anomaly takes the place of
Arcane Dynamo (note the lack
of a primary skill in the setup) to offer a last line of defense in unlucky,
lethal circumstances.
Adapting Gear
You will maintain the five worn pieces of the The Typhon's Veil set, and wear your
better roll between The Magistrate and
Tasker and Theo (and
cubing the worse one, along with
Ring of Royal Grandeur in the Cube in
order to maintain the 6-piece Typhon bonus).
Jewelry will largely match the GR progression setup, with
Squirt's Necklace offering a ubiquitous damage bonus for the slot that
is too hard to ignore. In T16 Nephalem Rift farm, you should pair it with a
pure DPS combo of
Convention of Elements and a Cold damage
Stone of Jordan, while in Bounties it is better to balance defense and
offense with a
Halo of Karini and a Cold SoJ.
Your utility slots offer the greater variance, with some ability to mix and
match according to your needs. In general, for T16 we advise that you stay on
the craftable Guardian set, which provides the universally useful doubling of
primary stats. You can, however, optimize further for T16 rifts and wear a
Goldwrap, which synergizes nicely with a socketed
Boon of the Hoarder legendary gem and an
Avarice Band worn by your
follower to extend your pickup radius; a combo that can render you practically
invulnerable and offers a steady stream of gold. For Bounties, you should
consider
Krelm's Buff Belt to further improve your run speed.
If you opted to use Goldwrap or
Krelm's Buff Belt, you will
need to adjust your bracer as well. This is where the old favorite,
Ashnagarr's Blood Bracer, shines — as it offers synergy with
Galvanizing Ward and your shield spells. If you are confident with your
power and handling the build however, you can alter this slot to the speed
buff of
Warzechian Armguards, or to
Nemesis Bracers in groups.
In a supremely optimized setup, you can consider dropping
Winter Flurry for the craftable
Cosmic Strand. This allows you
to alter
Teleport to the
Calamity rune, and drop
Blizzard for
Black Hole
Absolute Zero. This alteration will be
extremely mobile and flashy, but will be greatly taxing on your Arcane Power
resource management, and will require that you have a separate gear set for
farming with maxed out Resource Cost Reduction across the board.
Slot | Pieces | Stat Priority |
---|---|---|
Head |
|
|
Shoulders |
|
|
Torso |
|
|
Wrists |
|
|
Hands |
|
|
Waist |
|
|
Legs |
|
|
Feet |
|
|
Amulet |
|
|
Ring #1 |
|
|
Ring #2 |
|
|
Weapon |
|
|
Off-hand |
|
|
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: Attack Speed: 200 points.
- 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 Enforcer and
Bane of the Trapped still bring
excellent damage multiplication value to the build in T16 and Bounties. Within
the limited challenges of T16 and Bounties however,
Bane of the Stricken
should be replaced by either
Zei's Stone of Vengeance (stronger damage
increase, but positioning and range dependent) or
Bane of the Powerful (a
well-rounded damage increase and damage mitigation bonus with a timed
element).
Slot | Gems |
---|---|
Jewelry | |
Helm |
|
Torso and Pants |
|
Weapon |
For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.
Adapting Kanai's Cube
Depending on how confident you are with the rest of your gear, you can
stick to the GR progression staple Fragment of Destiny and maneuver
considerably slower through T16 rifts, or insert
Aether Walker in the
weapon Cube slot for unlimited
Teleport potential. Note that this
alteration should be made sooner than later, especially if you plan on doing
Bounties with the build.
The remainder of your Cube choices should mimic the GR progression setup,
with your weaker item between Tasker and Theo and
The Magistrate
in the armor slot, and a
Ring of Royal Grandeur in the jewelry slot.
Follower
The recommended follower for this build during T16 and Bounties is the
Enchantress, due to her cooldown reduction bonus (cutting down
Teleport downtime) and increased attack speed bonus (helping your
Hydras reach attack speed breakpoints easier).
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
Hydra 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: Added Season 27 Angelic Crucible recommendations.
- 14 Apr. 2022: Guide reviewed for Season 26.
- 06 Dec. 2021: Added Season 25 Soul Shard recommendations.
- 22 Oct. 2021: Variation added.
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.
- Mother’s Blessing Returns to Sanctuary (November 20-27)
- Battle.net Black Friday Sale: Up to 67% Off
- Living Steel Drop Rates Increased, Chest Spawns Fixed: November 14th Hotfix
- Living Steel and Living Steel Chest Improvements Coming With Hotfix This Week
- Blind Player Levels to 100 in Hardcore Diablo 4
- Extremely Lucky Player Gets 2 Shakos (Harlequin Crest) in 2 Duriel Kills
- How to Make Tortured Gift of Living Steel Helltide Chest Appear in Diablo 4 Season 2
- Mike Ybbara on Blizzard's Approach to Meeting Player Demands