Firebird Flame Blades Wizard BiS Gear, Gems, and Paragon Points

The build incorporates the complete Firebird's Finery set bonuses, taking six of the seven available pieces and leaving the jewelry fully dedicated to offense with the Bastions of Will set ( Focus and Restraint) and Squirt's Necklace. Rolls-wise, this is a uniquely set-based damage focused build that benefits from a good spread of Attack Speed and Crit-based affixes, but does not require any particular skill damage rolls to thrive. Firebird's Breast, Firebird's Down and Firebird's Tarsi can be dedicated entirely to Toughness stats; you can even consider doing the same with Firebird's Pinions, or dedicating one of the primary stat rolls to Resource Cost Reduction. Firebird's Plume is also an immense source of Toughness with its massive Intelligence and Vitality rolls, but it should also feature Crit Chance; Firebird's Talons should be stocked up on both Crit Chance and Crit Damage, as well as Attack Speed.

Your jewelry will be focused entirely on amplifying damage, with the Bastions of Will set occupying your two ring slots, and Squirt's Necklace — your neck. Focus and Restraint bring the highest possible damage multiplier from the slot as long as you alternate between a resource generating and resource spending attacks — a natural part of your rotation, as described in the Skills page. Squirt's Necklace is another grand source of damage multiplication, with a significant damage intake trade-off; you will be trying to maintain its bonuses with the use of Ashnagarr's Blood Bracer, which doubles the effectiveness of your Deflection and Galvanizing Ward shields.

Since you will be using Spectral Blade to deliver the bulk of the damage, it is only natural to bring two signature skill-centric items into the fold. The Shame of Delsere amplifies the attack speed of your signature skills (which Spectral Blade is part of), and adds an Arcane Power restoration angle to them, which helps maintain your reserve (and cubed Aquila Cuirass bonuses). Fragment of Destiny also brings an attack speed multiplier, as well as a massive damage increase to signature skills.

Rounding out your gear setup, Orb of Infinite Depth brings twofold value to the build with its damage increasing and damage reducing buffs as you spam Explosive Blast.

The gear setup described above is not the only viable option to build your Firebird Flame Blades Wizard or Greater Rift solo pushes. Depending on your preferred playstyle and your confidence with the mechanics of the build, you can also make the following alterations:

• 1) If you dislike playing around the Squirt's Necklace increased damage taken penalty, you can play with the Endless Walk set ( The Traveler's Pledge and The Compass Rose), combined with Convention of Elements.
• 2) Using the craftable Cpt. Crimson set with Captain Crimson's Silk Girdle and Captain Crimson's Thrust for additional damage dealt and damage reduced scaling with your CDR and RCR stats.
• 3) Using the craftable Aughild's Authority set with Aughild's Search and Aughild's Power for additional damage against, and reduced damage from elite enemies.
• Changes 2) and 3) specifically necessitate that you use Firebird's Eye as your offhand, along with a Ring of Royal Grandeur in the Cube. This moves The Shame of Delsere and Orb of Infinite Depth to the Cube, and loses you The Furnace and Aquila Cuirass.

In your Offense stats, strive to obtain Increased Attack Speed on all the gear pieces that are able to roll it (Weapon, Gloves and both Rings) with the exception of the Amulet, as you will lose other, more valuable stats. Note that Increased Attack Speed is especially desirable on the weapon, since weapon attack speed rolls are multiplicative in nature. Conversely, due to the dominantly set-based nature of the damage you inflict, Area Damage is excluded from the build as a useless roll.

In order to maximize the benefits of the Elemental Exposure passive, your ideal Fragment of Destiny roll will have Cold damage as its base damage type (the damage type is denoted next to the big numbers that define the DPS of your weapon). Elemental Exposure is one of the rare instances where weapon damage type comes into effect, and will count as a stack towards the damage bonuses of the passive. Keep in mind that this is a high-end optimization roll and should not take precedence over other, more important stats.

For Defense stats, aim for a life pool 900k and above, which should be trivial with the minor stat requirements for other aspects of the build. This build also focuses heavily on shields for survivability and buff maintenance, making it one of the more resilient Wizard builds; health sustain stats outside of Paragon points are not required. Note that both Galvanizing Ward and Magic Weapon Deflection scale off total life, making Vitality and Life % much better for overall Toughness compared to many other classes in the game.

All augmentations on gear should be done with your main stat, Intelligence.

Note that the stat suggestions below portray an ideally rolled item with stats listed in relative order of importance. The first four of them are main stats, and the latter two — secondary stats. If your item lacks and is unable to be rerolled into the primary stats outlined below, especially for a stat higher on the list, strongly consider its replacement. Perfecting Secondary stats is mostly a case of hyper-optimization and is not a case for discarding an item, except where noted.

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. For this build, we recommend swapping Spectral Blade Flame Blades from the main version of this build for Magic Missile Conflagrate, and then aim for the Magic Missile Sanctification — which adds the following power to your build:

• Magic Missile Sanctification: Magic Missile fires 10 missiles and gains the effect of the Seeker rune.

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). In the case of this build, good candidates for Sanctification are your weapon ( Unstable Scepter) and your off-hand ( Triumvirate).

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.

In the Core section, max out Movement Speed to the 25% cap. Normally this is done by dumping the first 50 Core Paragon points into Movement Speed, but if your boots have an imperfect roll with Movement Speed as a stat that you cannot replace, adjust the necessary point investment accordingly by simply subtracting your roll from the 25% max. After that, dump as much as you comfortably can into Intelligence, but feel free to invest into Vitality if you feel yourself lacking in Toughness; remember that Wizard shields scale off maximum health, and try to reach the recommended toughness values outlined above. Adding to Maximum Arcane Power should not be necessary.

In the Offense section, max out Attack Speed, Crit Damage, Crit Chance, and Cooldown Reduction in that order. In Defense, prioritize Life %, then Armor, then All Resistance, and finish off with Life Regeneration. In Utility, build up Life on Hit and Resource Cost Reduction first, then finish off with Globe Radius. Skip Area Damage, as it does nothing for the build except potentially lag out your game.

Bane of the Trapped is a potent source of additional damage, as it is its own multiplier in your total damage calculation. You will benefit from it naturally, as Flame Blade Wizards need to fight within melee range — and Bane of the Trapped procs itself with the level 25 property.

Bane of the Stricken builds up your damage multiplicatively in prolonged fights and has a level 25 bonus specifically targeting Rift Guardians; this gem is designed to assist AoE heavy builds in their struggle against single target, high HP enemies. Flame Blade Wizards are no exception.

Your final jewelry socket will be taken by Gogok of Swiftness, whose Increased Attack Speed, Cooldown Reduction, and scaling Dodge bonuses all bring massive value to the build. An alternative for this slot is Pain Enhancer, which can bring great AoE value in the right circumstances (massive pulls in densely populated Greater Rifts), but is a secondary recommendation due to its circumstantial nature; Gogok generally brings better consistency to the build.

When it comes to gear gems, you will start out progression by slotting the highest available level of Topazes in the chest and pants sockets. Ideally, these will all be Flawless Royal Topaz as soon as possible. As you grow in Paragon (bulking up Intelligence in the Core section) and aim for higher tier and more dangerous GRs, you will transition those gems into the defensive Flawless Royal Ruby (Intelligence-based classes such as the Wizard are naturally high in Resistances, so their protection scales better with improving Armor instead). There is no specific breakpoint where you do that; the rule of thumb is to make the change as soon as you feel the lack of toughness impede your progress. Since this is a Health-reliant build, we recommend a Flawless Royal Amethyst in the helm. In your weapon, use Flawless Royal Emerald for the Crit Damage boost.

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

The Furnace is a preferred piece in the weapon Cube slot, with a simple yet undeniable power — 50% increased damage against elites, assisting you in taking down the hardest fights in Greater Rifts: Champions and Rift Guardians.

Aquila Cuirass is a damage reduction powerhouse, cutting all damage taken in half as long as your resource pool stays near its cap. With the high Arcane Power restoration coming from your attack speed and The Shame of Delsere bonuses, this buff can be reasonably maintained. If you feel it dropping off too much, consider using a Flawless Royal Topaz in your helm and rolling Resource Cost Reduction on your shoulders.

Tucked away in the Cube, Convention of Elements brings yet another source of damage multiplication, which — due to its cyclical nature — requires a playstyle of pulling enemies during the off-cycles, and utter decimation during the relevant (Fire) buff cycle of the ring.

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 solo GR progression is the Enchantress, due to her increased attack speed bonuses (helpful for the attack speed breakpoint-reliant methods of dealing damage in this build) via Focused Mind, as well as the elemental damage bonus from Amplification and damage reduction from Powered Shield.

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.