Firebird Flame Blades Wizard Greater Rift Speed Farming Variation

The Firebird Flame Blades 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
Spectral Blade Flame Blades Disintegrate Chaos Nexus 1 Explosive Blast Chain Reaction 2 Frost Nova Bone Chill 3 Teleport Safe Passage 4 Black Hole Spellsteal
Passive Skills
Audacity Elemental Exposure Evocation Galvanizing Ward

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 alternate between Combustion stacks upkeep with Disintegrate, as well as its spread of the Ignition effect on enemies, and actually mowing them down with Spectral Blade. Manipulate your enemies into large pulls with Black Hole, and reposition smartly with Teleport — that is everything necessary in GR speed farm.

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 Spectral Blade Flame Blades 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, as usual.

As a non-channeling fire-based skill in its own right, Explosive Blast Chain Reaction will bring its own damage value to the build, but it is largely taken for the Orb of Infinite Depth protective interaction.

The protection offered by Magic Weapon Deflection and Galvanizing Ward in conjunction with the worn Ashnagarr's Blood Bracer is too valuable to pass up, especially to keep the damage bonuses of Squirt's Necklace intact. Note that in Season 25 Magic Weapon will have to be replaced by Frost Nova Bone Chill in order to get a proc for the CC-reliant Remnant of Pain Soul Shard.

Pulls will hasten runs by a large margin, so Black Hole Spellsteal will still find a place on your bar, and the inclusion of Teleport Safe Passage is non-negotiable in speed farming, where mobility is a primary concern. To smooth out the uptime of both skills in quick farming runs, you will be taking Evocation as your final passive.

You will be equipping 5 pieces of the Firebird set, and will be adding the CDR and RCR utility of the craftable Cpt. Crimson set 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 Attack Speed and a smattering of Cooldown Reduction.

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.

Bane of the Trapped still bring excellent damage multiplication value to the build in speed farming; Gogok of Swiftness is also universally helpful with its Increased Attack Speed, Cooldown Reduction, and scaling Dodge 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.

With Elite and Rift Guardian fights being much less of a threat and bottleneck in Speed Greater Rifts, you should replace our base build recommendation of The Furnace for the attack- and movement speed amplifier Echoing Fury.

As this remains a Spectral Blade-centric build when it comes to delivering the bulk of your damage, The Shame of Delsere is still a crucial part of the build that simply gets moved off the worn pieces and into the armor slot of the Cube.

As previously mentioned, in order to tie the set bonuses of Firebird and Cpt. Crimson 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 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.