Meteor Wizard Skills and Runes

Active Skills
Arcane Torrent Flame Ward Teleport Safe Passage 1 Meteor Meteor Shower 2 Magic Weapon Ignite 3 Frost Nova Bone Chill 4 Ice Armor Crystallize
Passive Skills
Audacity Blur Unwavering Will Illusionist

The Firebird Meteor Wizard strategy is to lure enemies, dragging them along to form the biggest fight possible. Notice that the 6-piece set bonus will scale your damage and protection for each burning enemy, and will automatically max out if an elite enemy is burning — contributing to the elite hunting playstyle of the build. Once you scout out a sizable fight with Teleport, begin channeling Arcane Torrent Flame Ward to trigger the Meteors from Etched Sigil, and add your own, manually cast Meteors at three second intervals (the duration of a Meteor Shower) to maximize damage output. Needless to say, keep passive background buffs like Ice Armor and Magic Weapon active at all times.

To clarify the Firebird set bonus, dealing Fire damage with any character skill (weapon damage and item procs are excluded) cause the enemy to burn for 1000% weapon damage over a 3-second period. Doing fire damage with any other skill will add to the DoT damage in 1000% increments, and reset its duration. Once the enemy is burning from three separate fire skills, he will ignite with an indefinite 3000% weapon damage per second DoT — which does not imply, of course, that you should stop attacking that enemy. There is an accompanying visual over the head of the monster in the shape of a flame, once the permanent DoT is applied. The DoT will not crit (similarly to other DoTs in the game), but will factor in your crit stats into an average number. The DoT will display every 0.8 seconds and will not interact with attack speed in any way. Moving more than two screens away from the burning enemy will make the DoT fall off, but coming back in range will resume it.

The primary damage dealer and namesake of the build, Meteor, summons a delayed aerial strike over a large surface approximating the position of your cursor, lending itself perfectly to large AoE situations. You will be taking the skill with its hardest hitting rune, Meteor Shower, and you will augment its damage even further with other skill choices and itemization.

In order to circumvent the massive Arcane Power cost of spamming Meteor (40 AP per shot from about 100 AP pool max — simply unsustainable), you will be equipping Etched Sigil and using its power to get free Meteors by channeling Arcane Torrent. While the other listed channeled spenders can also work, Arcane Torrent outshines them with speed, versatility and adaptability, plus a great Fire rune to boot, which is necessary for the Firebird set bonus. The Flame Ward rune will add a valuable protective angle to a skill you will be channeling for most of the run.

To finish off the trio of necessary Fire skills to max out the Firebird set bonus, you will be using Magic Weapon for its minor, yet elementally appropriate DPS proc with the Ignite rune.

The remainder of your skills will be dedicated to protection and utility, leading off with the Wizard's trusty mobility and repositioning tool Teleport. You will add an angle of survivability to the skill during your progression attempts with the rune Safe Passage.

The independence of Halo of Arlyse procs might discourage you to take Frost Nova at first — after all, the ring will cast a generic Frost Nova regardless of you slotting the skill or not. The reason to include it in the build is that the Halo of Arlyse spam will inherit the rune from your skill bar (see this build's gear page for more information), and Bone Chill will essentially provide you with a permanent 33% additive damage increase against enemies in melee range.

For additional protection, we will be using Ice Armor with the massive bulwark of Crystallize. Firmly standing in place to channel for its damage, the build will inevitably put you in melee brawls, refreshing your Crystallize stacks constantly. The added value from Halo of Arlyse will bring excellent crowd control on top of the mitigation, solidifying Ice Armor as the defensive spell of choice for Greater Rifts.

This concludes the overview of the Active Skills, now let us look through the Passives.

Two protective picks provide the foundation of the passive choices. Blur is a straightforward addition to the glassy Firebird build, reducing incoming damage by a flat 17%. On the other hand, Unwavering Will provides a conditional layer of protection — including valuable Armor to counterbalance the abundant Resistance of Wizards — as long as you briefly stand still. This is easily fulfilled in a channeling build.

Illusionist is a passive with a lot of depth and nuance; it serves this build specifically by resetting the Teleport cooldown when receiving a damage spike in high Greater Rifts, and working with a pre-mitigation calculation it gives you near infinite mobility. The additional 30% movement speed after Teleporting makes the passive even more attractive.

Finally, Audacity gets a chance to shine in this dominantly melee range build by bringing an impressive 30% multiplicative damage increase against enemies within 15 yards.