Tal Meteor Wizard BiS Gear, Gems, and Paragon Points

With the flexibility afforded by the seven available pieces of the Tal Rasha set and the Ring of Royal Grandeur, you will be able to take five Tal's set pieces, mix in an additional set into the build, and still fit extra legendaries. In Greater Rifts, this additional set will be Aughild's Authority, attaining its bonuses by wearing Aughild's Power and Aughild's Search. Note that this is a craftable set at the Blacksmith in town, making perfecting its rolls a somewhat easier task. A suggested split between the sets is listed below, though you can vary the pieces according to your preference and best rolls, as long as you maintain the required 5 Tal's — 2 Aughild's set pieces combination, along with RoRG in the Cube.

Rolls-wise this precise, nuke-oriented build will benefit greatly from Skill Damage and Area Damage affixes, alongside the usual stacking of Crit-related stats. High Crit Chance and Crit Damage are needed on the gloves, alongside Intelligence and Area Damage. Meteor % damage can roll on helm and boots, so obtain it on both; the former will also include an Attack Speed roll (innate stat on Mempo of Twilight). The pants, belt and chest should be largely Toughness slots. Arcane damage, double Crit stats and an open Socket are BiS on the amulet.

With your amulet slot occupied by Tal's, your best way to finish off jewelry is to split between offense and defense in the rings with the combination of Convention of Elements and Halo of Karini. Convention of Elements boosts your elemental damage in cycles according to the elements available to your class, so you need to internalize its rotation and be ready with your pulls for the Arcane cycle, when you should burst enemies down. Halo of Karini offers massive damage reduction that is just about non-negotiable, and has the modest requirement of keeping your Storm Armor active and keeping distance from the enemy. Note that if you want to introduce more tankiness to the build, either due to playing Hardcore or inexperience with the playstyle, you can drop CoE for the added safety of Unity, coupled with another on the follower plus an immortality relic for them (i.e. Enchanting Favor). This will cut incoming damage in half.

A trio of Meteor-specific items make up the remainder of your gear. Buffed in Patch 2.7.4, Mempo of Twilight now applies the Meteor Shower rune to all casted Meteors, and multiples their damage. Nilfur's Boast is a Meteor build mainstay, further multiplying the skill's damage, and empowering it against singular targets — a massive boon against Rift Guardians. Finally, the mandatory weapon for the build is The Grand Vizier — a two-handed legendary staff that reduces the Arcane Power cost of Meteor in half, and, once again, greatly multiplies its damage. Note that unlike its fixed Resource Cost Reduction bonus, the damage multiplication is of variable strength — and try to get as good of a roll as you can.

Due to the 4th Kanai's Cube slot in this Season, replace The Grand Vizier as your worn weapon with a combo of Orb of Infinite Depth plus a well-rolled one-handed weapon (i.e. Pig Sticker, whose ability to roll 5 main stats make it an attractive option). Move The Grand Vizier to the 4th Cube slot.

For Offense stats, try to obtain Meteor % bonus on the helm and boots (maximum of 30%), Arcane elemental damage on the amulet and wrists (maximum of 40%), Crit Chance and Crit Damage within a 1:10 ratio (ideally over 45% and 450%, respectively), and Area Damage of 150%+.

For Defense stats, aim for a life pool of 800k+; dropping as much as you can for offense as you grow accustomed to the build. You will mostly sustain through your follower, so you will not be focusing on regenerative rolls on gear.

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.

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. Then, max out Arcane Power — the damage of Star Pact scales off AP spent. 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.

In the Offense section, max out Crit Damage, Crit Chance, Cooldown Reduction and Attack Speed in that order. In Defense, prioritize Armor, then Life %, then All Resistance, and finish off with Life Regeneration. In Utility, build up Area Damage and Resource Cost Reduction first, then finish off with Life on Hit and Globe Radius.

Bane of the Trapped is the staple gem of the build; a potent source of additional damage, as it is its own multiplier in your total damage calculation. The gem procs itself with its level 25 property, as well as various other sources of crowd control in your and your follower's builds.

Esoteric Alteration brings a massive defensive bulwark to the build, reducing non-Physical damage by an amount scaling with the gem's level. The most threatening attacks in Greater Rifts are the elemental affixes of the various Elite enemies you encounter, so the reduction of non-Physical damage is of highest importance. This gem further amplifies your elemental resistances with its level 25 property, which triggers when you get damaged below 50% of your health pool — a frequent enough scenario in high Greater Rift progression.

Introduced in Season 4, Bane of the Stricken occupies the third and final jewelry socket. Building up your damage multiplicatively in prolonged fights and with 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 during Greater Rift progression attempts.

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 Resource-intensive build, we recommend a Flawless Royal Topaz 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.

Tucked away in the Cube, The Smoldering Core provides essential powers for Meteor-based builds. Its luring effect does pretty much what it says on the tin — enemies are drawn (Taunted) to the impact areas of your Meteor casts. The stacking damage debuff ("consecutive hits against an enemy increase in damage") has a 5-second duration, refreshed on re-application. It produces a separate damage multiplier in your total damage calculation, and builds up to 500% extra damage on top. These effects combined make this item an essential legendary effect for the build.

To counteract your resource pool depletion, you will be using The Shame of Delsere in the Cube, which augments your Signature Spells with a massive Arcane Power restoration angle.

For the jewelry Cube slot, you will need to use the Ring of Royal Grandeur in order to tie the Tal Rasha and Aughild sets together. This cache legendary ring from Act I bounties reduces the number of worn items required for set bonus completion by one, allowing for the set amalgamation described above.

In Season 33, where you get a 4th slot for the Kanai's Cube, you can use the Orb of Infinite Depth - Pig Sticker combo in your gear and move the build-defining power of The Grand Vizier in this bonus space.

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.

For Greater Rift progression with this build, we recommend the Templar for his essential heal and cheat death abilities. The Templar is a preferable choice due to the lacking sustain in this build, as well as the overall lackluster cheat death passive that Wizards have.

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.

The preferred potions for this build are Bottomless Potion of Kulle-Aid (allowing you to break down Waller affixes that impede Frozen Orb DPS), Bottomless Potion of the Unfettered (giving you a brief window of CC immunity to counter your lack of CC-breaking or immunity skills), or Bottomless Potion of the Tower (whose Armor-increasing properties complement the naturally high All Resistances stat of Wizards). Pick whichever you feel helps you out the most.