Having trouble fighting Diablo in Nightmare? Well, I put this build/guide together to help you move onto hell and that much closer to end game Inferno. With Diablo I had to
think of a way to slow him down while hitting him with the most DPS, so I came up with the build below. For this build you must reach level 51
Build – Mouse over for a preview.
Mouse 1 – Magic Missile with Charged Blast skill rune.
Mouse 2 – Ray of Frost with Snow Blast skill rune.
Skill 1 – Diamond Skin with Crystal Shell skill rune.
Skill 2 – Frost Nova with Bone Chill skill rune.
Skill 3 – Familiar with Sparkflint skill rune.
Skill 4 – Slow Time with Time Warp skill rune.
Why These Skills
The main reason I wanted to find a build that would slow him down was because you NEED to keep moving while fighting Diablo in all 3 phases and having these slows helped me a lot while giving me a chance to blast him with some huge DPS with Snow Blast.
Frost Nova with Bone Chill was the first skill I would throw down on Diablo and was used every 12 seconds to keep the 12% increase in damage while frozen or chilled by Frost Nova bonus. Frost Nova was also a great skill to use on Diablo because if timed right you can interrupt the attacks coming your way like his bone cage because if you get caught Diablo will crush you and it is almost always certain death. A small tip to stay alive if you get caught in this cage, is too either activate Diamond Skin or have the health pots hot key ready to mash.
Slow Time I found was good to use in conjunction with Frost Nova. As I said before with this Wizard build, I was going for slows to keep Diablo’s movement and attack frequency down to a minimal but keeping a high damage output. With using Rune skill Time Warp then blasting a Frost Nova this will give you a total of 35% more damage.
Diamond Skin with Crystal Shell is a skill that I use all the time with my play style. I don’t normally play with a lot of defense so having this skill helps me out of a lot of troubling situations. It’s a pretty simple strategy with this skill, while fighting Diablo all you have to do is use it every time it’s available but having your timing down is important. You’ll want to use this skill when getting up close to use FN & TW. The one critical thing you have to remember is to have it ready to use when you enter phase 2, the reason for this is your shadow clone is going spawn right away and if your armor is not ready to use the clone will rock your socks.
Ray of Frost with Snow Blast is a great skill to use for its high damage output getting to 280% over 1.5 seconds as cold, this is going to go really well with our Cold Blooded passive which we’ll talk about very soon. I also like using this skill because of how easy it is to use on single targets and adds a 30% movement reduction. The main strategy behind this skill is to be spamming it the second you use FN and TW to take advantage of the 35% increase in damage we talked about before.
Familiar with sparkflint is a skill you don’t really need to think about just cast and let it do its 20% weapon damage as arcane while also giving you a 12% increase in damage to all attacks while its active(5 minutes).
Passive Skills
Evocation is a must have since your relying so much on your CD skills, so having all cool downs reduced by 15% will help this build a lot.
Cold Blooded is the core Passive to this build because of the synergy it has with Ray of Frost, it will be your main attack you will be using on Diablo together with Frost Nova which will add additional 20% to your RoF.
Glass Cannon works for me as it plays into my build for high DPS. Plus, I don’t really see a better Passive that would work into this build.
By using this build I was able to slow Diablo down for my teammates and I was still able to deal a large amount of DPS to be a viable player. If you don’t mind getting in close and dirty to help your mates this is the build for you, it’s the build I used to make my way to hell.
Our long war ends today.