Firebird Explosive Blast Wizard Greater Rift Speed Farming Variation

The Firebird Explosive Blast Wizard can deal excellently with Greater Rift Speed Farming, with versatile and unconditional damage at its disposal and great mobility offered by the Teleport-resetting powers of the Firebird set. 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
Disintegrate Chaos Nexus Magic Weapon Deflection 1 Explosive Blast Chain Reaction 2 Frost Nova Bone Chill 3 Teleport Safe Passage 4 Diamond Skin Prism
Passive Skills
Audacity Galvanizing Ward Dominance Evocation

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.

In GR speeds, you will basically be doing an accelerated version of the core rotation. You will still put priority on establishing defenses first thing in the rift — channeling Disintegrate for stacks, activation of Magic Weapon Deflection, and hitting enemies with Explosive Blast for the Orb of Infinite Depth interaction. With that handled, you will simply keep up your Combustion stacks with continued channeling of Disintegrate, which also spreads the Ignition effect on enemies, while exploding them in melee range with Explosive Blast. Ease the strain on your resources with Diamond Skin Prism spam, which also helps to keep up your Squirt's damage bonus with its basic defensive properties. Lastly, reposition with Teleport to the follower-worn Oculus Ring procs in battle, keeping in mind the 1-second delay before Mantle of Channeling's buff kicks into effect — important when you want to line it up with Convention of Elements's Fire cycle when you want to burst down elites.

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.

Your entire active skill selection will match the base GR solo progression setup, with the interplay between Disintegrate Chaos Nexus and Explosive Blast Chain Reaction forming the base of the build by ramping up Combustion stacks and bursting them down, respectively. You will augment this damage by taking Audacity and Elemental Exposure in your passives, and Evocation will help keeping the Explosive Blast spam as frequent as possible.

Your utility lineup from the GR progression build remains intact; Frost Nova brings crowd control and a valuable "damage taken increased" debuff on affected enemies via the rune Bone Chill, while Magic Weapon Deflection and Diamond Skin construct a shielding buffer that protects your Squirt's Necklace damage multiplier. Diamond Skin also gets a valuable resource management angle from the rune Prism.

To account for the reckless playstyle of speed Greater Rifts, with plenty of Teleport Safe Passages into unfortunate enemy AoE, you should finalize the protective layer over Squirt's with Dominance. This defensive passive is very fitting for speed farming specifically, as it emphasizes your advantage in difficulties that you easily triumph in and snowballs your advantage even further with its stacking shield.

You will be equipping 5 pieces of the Firebird set, and will be adding the dual utility of the craftable Cpt. Crimson and Aughild sets on top; of course, both sets will be complete via a Ring of Royal Grandeur in the Cube. Stat priorities will remain largely the same, with a focus on Toughness stats across gear, as well as Cooldown Reduction wherever possible.

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.

This Season comes with the theme of Angelic Crucibles — consumable items that empower Legendary items with perfected Ancient-level stats, as well as infuse them with one of three unique, powerful, class-specific abilities at random.

Unfortunately, Explosive Blast-based builds do not have a great way of utilizing the three Sanctification powers. Thus, you should simply use Angelic Crucibles on an item that crosses over most (if not all) variants of a build, and is also an item that is relatively harder to perfect than other slots (since sanctifying an item maximizes its stats). The Sanctification power outcome does not matter. In the case of this build, a good candidate for Sanctification are your weapon, Deathwish, or a jewelry piece like Convention of Elements.

You can read more on Angelic Crucibles and the sanctification process in our dedicated Angelic Crucible Mechanics guide.

The former Season 28 theme, the Altar of Rites, has been revised and re-added to Diablo 3 as a permanent character progression mechanic. — For virtually all builds and players of all skill levels — from casual to advanced — we recommend progressing through the Altar tree using the path outlined below. The suggested path is geared towards maximum quality of life first, then amplifying damage, and then mopping up the tree with defensive and edge case utility nodes.

Note that while they require reaching them with a Seal, Legendary Potion Powers are not part of the Seal cost system; Potions unlock with a separate resource called Primordial Ashes, obtained from salvaging Legendary or Set items of Primal (red bordered) quality. Upgrade them as soon as possible, and in the order shown below (courtesy of Caleko's Altar of Rites planner).

You can read more on the Altar of Rites, Seals and Legendary Potion Powers in our dedicated Altar of Rites Mechanics guide.

Bane of the Trapped still bring excellent damage multiplication value to the build in speed farming; Taeguk is also universally helpful to solo channeling builds with its additive damage and Armor bonuses.

Within the limited challenges of Speed Greater Rifts, Bane of the Stricken should be replaced by Bane of the Powerful for its well-rounded damage increase and damage mitigation bonuses; its limited duration should be of no consequence when you are demolishing the difficulty.

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

The GR solo progression emphasis on Explosive Blast as the central damage dealer of the build is kept well into GR speed farming, and you will be hard-pressed to find a bigger "bang for your buck" item than Orb of Infinite Depth in the weapon Cube slot. It turns every Explosive Blast detonation into a multiplicative damage increase and damage reduction bonus.

Mantle of Channeling retains its value in speed GRs as well, with a multiplicative increase to damage dealt, as well as an equal reduction in damage taken while channeling.

As previously mentioned, in order to tie the set bonuses of Firebird, Cpt. Crimson and Aughild together, you will have to put Ring of Royal Grandeur in the jewelry slot of the Cube.

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.

The recommended follower for this build during GR speed farming is the Enchantress, due to her cooldown reduction bonus from Prophetic Harmony and damage reduction from Powered Shield. She can also add a free cheat death to the build via Fate's Lapse.

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.

Your recommended potion is Bottomless Potion of the Unfettered, which renders you immune to Crowd Control effects for a brief time after consuming it — valuable bonus to a build that lacks means to break away from CC outside of straight up evasion via teleporting.