Firebird Wizard Speed Farming Variation

The Firebird Archon Wizard can deal reasonably well with Normal Rift farming all the way through the highest Torment difficulties. The build variation suffers from minor inconveniences compared to top tier speed farming builds (i.e. missing the convenience of all the Archon runes, which a Vyr-based build would possess).

Within the limited scope of regular difficulties, the necessary damage and toughness to triumph over the enemy is significantly smaller. Thus, your best course of action is to improve utility and speed.

Active Skills
Spectral Blade Flame Blades Archon Combustion 1 Familiar Sparkflint 2 Magic Weapon Force Weapon 3 Teleport Wormhole 4 Storm Armor Scramble
Passive Skills
Audacity Power Hungry Evocation Illusionist

The following skill selection alterations will be necessary:

• When running Torment rifts, you can find a minor benefit in switching your Teleport rune to the more mobile Wormhole.
• The protective Frost Nova cooldown will not be necessary in regular farming, so swap it out for the minor passive damage increase of Familiar Sparkflint.
• You should also replace the overly protective Ice Armor Crystallize with Storm Armor Scramble for its reliable movement speed proc.
• Passives-wise, Unstable Anomaly is less necessary in speed farming content, and can be shifted out so you can take the additional damage from Power Hungry instead.

Since in normal rifts you can easily overkill on mitigation and damage, it is best that you focus on movement speed on gear as well. The Act III cache legendary Avarice Band is perfectly suitable for that, as its high Pickup Radius and synergy with Boon of the Hoarder will speed you up and keep you wealthy as you complete runs.

Another suitable swap is the change from Ancient Parthan Defenders into Nemesis Bracers, to provide a constant streak of elites for the cubed In-geom.

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.

In Torments Bane of the Stricken will build up too slowly to matter, and is best replaced by a speed run oriented gem like Boon of the Hoarder. The gem nets you an average of 20-30 million gold per run with no particular focus on Gold Find stats, and it gives you a massive short-term speed boost while picking up gold. With the use of Avarice Band and its massive Pickup Radius bonuses, this will be done automatically, allowing you to focus on the clear.

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

The extra damage from The Furnace is a non-concern in normal rifts, where In-geom shines by reducing 10 seconds flat off the cooldown of all of your skills after you burst an elite. In a normal rift, the 15-second duration of the effect is plenty of time to find a new elite and refresh the In-geom bonus. This will allow you to chain Archon with very minimal downtime.

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.