Vyr Archon Wizard Skills and Runes

Table of Contents

• +Introduction
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Quick Reference
    • 2.1. Skill Setup
  • 3. Builds
    • 3.1. Gear Setup
    • 3.2. Legendary Gems
    • 3.3. Kanai's Cube
  • 4. Role in the Current Meta
  • 5. Reading Further
  • 6. Changelog
• ×Skills and Runes
  • 1. Rotation
  • 2. Skills, Runes and Passives
  • 3. Changelog
• +Gear, Gems, and Paragon Points
  • 1. Best in Slot Gear and Alternatives
  • 2. Paragon Points
  • 3. Gems
  • 4. Kanai's Cube
  • 5. Follower
  • 6. Changelog
• +Speed Farming Variation
  • 1. Speed Farming
  • 2. Adapting Skills
  • 3. Adapting Gear
  • 4. Adapting Gemming
  • 5. Adapting Kanai's Cube
  • 6. Changelog

General Information

Below, we explain how to choose and use your skills when playing Vyr Archon Wizard in Diablo 3. Updated for patch 2.6.1 and Season 15.

The other pages of our Vyr Archon Wizard guide can be accessed from the table of contents on the right.

Active Skills
Arcane Torrent Static Discharge Teleport Safe Passage 1 Archon No rune chosen 2 Explosive Blast Chain Reaction 3 Storm Armor Power of the Storm 4 Magic Weapon Conduit
Passive Skills
Evocation Paralysis Unstable Anomaly Audacity

1. Rotation

The strategy of this build revolves around the in- and out- of Archon dynamic, trying to conserve and increase power as much as you can outside your alternate form and unleashing the built up damage potential during the Archon uptime.

Once you return to regular form, The Swami helm in the Cube will ensure you keep the positive effects of your Archon stacks up to 20 seconds; this enables you to survive and wait out your Archon cooldown. During the downtime, you will be channeling Arcane Torrent for massive, Taeguk and Deathwish-buffed Manald Heal procs. You will be spamming Explosive Blast Chain Reaction for the damage reduction of Orb of Infinite Depth, and will keep up Storm Armor for the background protective buff of Halo of Karini. Keep Magic Weapon Conduit active at all times, as it will balance out your resource spending (along with Power of the Storm). Last but not least, reposition smartly with Teleport whenever necessary.

2. Skills, Runes and Passives

Its presence in the build is pretty self-explanatory, but Archon should be on your skill bar. You have a degree of freedom with your element of choice, as you receive the benefits of all the runes through the Vyr 2-piece set bonus. It goes without saying, but pop this form as soon as it comes up and stay in it as long and as frequently as you can.

Your trusty tool for cooldown resets, Arcane Torrent will be used with the projectile splitting Static Discharge rune to bring you fast and reliable Manald Heal procs. Depending on your positioning, confidence and leftover Archon stacks, you can either remain stationary and channel it for optimal damage output via the Deathwish, or try to kite and keep up the Taeguk defenses.

Your biggest moment of weakness comes when Archon falls off, and immediate repositioning will often be in order — evading a bad situation, engaging fresh enemies, or simply moving ahead to a new area. Teleport will be instrumental for all these purposes, along with the damage reduction of the Safe Passage rune.

Explosive Blast will be included in the setup strictly as means of protection and buffing your other damage dealing skills. You will be taking the multiple explosions of the Chain Reaction rune, quickly maximizing the buffs from the Orb of Infinite Depth source.

In order to balance out the resource-intensive phases of Arcane Torrent channeling, you will include the minor damage amplifier Magic Weapon mostly for the Arcane Power restoration of the Conduit rune. This long lasting steroid remains quietly in the background and procs consistently off your spellcasting barrage, nicely balancing your AP reserve.

Rounding skills out, you will be adding Storm Armor to the build. With a fire-and-forget duration of 10 minutes and a negligible damage proc, it can be easily overlooked if not for the potent flat resource cost reduction of the Power of the Storm rune, and the massive damage reduction properties of Halo of Karini.

This concludes the overview of the Active Skills, now let us look through the Passives.

Paralysis is a necessary inclusion in a build that relies on Manald Heal procs to deal damage; no other stun will trigger the ring. The Paralysis stun is applied on cast to every enemy affected by the spell at the time of the proc; the passive is unaffected by proc coefficients of the used skill.

Reworked into a comparable function to other cheat deaths, Unstable Anomaly gives you one shot at dodging a lethal situation. Operating on a standard 60-second cooldown and adding a 3-second stun to nearby enemies — plus a solid, 400% max life shield for 5 seconds.

Evocation is a simple and straightforward passive — a solid chunk of 20% Cooldown Reduction. With the overarching goal of the playstyle to bring your Archon downtime as low as possible, Evocation becomes a natural fit.

Finally, Audacity gets a chance to shine in this dominantly melee range build by bringing an impressive 30% multiplicative damage increase against enemies within 15 yards.

About the Author

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.

3. Changelog

• 26 Nov. 2017: Significant revision to skill selection.
• 27 Oct. 2017: Revised skills to reflect its Patch 2.6.1 buffs.

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