Tal Meteor Wizard Greater Rift Speed Farming Variation

The Tal Meteor Wizard can deal reasonably well with Greater Rift Speed Farming, with the ability to wipe entire screen's worth of enemies with the Meteor barrage. 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
Diamond Skin Prism Meteor Star Pact 1 Magic Weapon Deflection 2 Familiar Icicle 3 Teleport Calamity 4 Storm Armor Power of the Storm
Passive Skills
Audacity Galvanizing Ward Illusionist Elemental Exposure

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.

The build will maintain the vast majority of the GR progression playstyle (four stacks of Tal Rasha from four skills of different elements, using Meteor to decimate the entire pull, etc.), but shifts to a faster and more aggressive mindset. The build is very easy on the micro, as it sports three semi-passive buffs in its "active" skills: Storm Armor Power of the Storm, Familiar Icicle and Magic Weapon Deflection. These 10-minute buffs will keep you safe throughout the rift, and proc half of the elemental requirements (Lightning and Cold) of the Tal Rasha set. To assist your heavy Arcane Power spending, you should apply Diamond Skin Prism as soon as it comes off cooldown. Teleport Calamity will serve double duty as a method of repositioning, as well as proccing the Arcane portion of Tal Rasha. Naturally, your damage will come from Meteor, which you should hurl with reckless abandon on top of your enemies' heads.

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.

• The Fire Tal Rasha Proc, as well as your main damage dealer, is found in Meteor. Swap to the unruned version, which befits speed farming content; you still get the benefits of the Meteor Shower rune from the Cubed Mempo of Twilight.
• The Lightning Tal Rasha proc will come from Storm Armor. It is also taken for the massive damage reduction of Halo of Karini, and you can assist your frivolous resource spending in speed GRs with the Power of the Storm rune. You will further solidify your resource management with Diamond Skin Prism.
• The Arcane Tal Rasha proc will be taken care of by Teleport Calamity, which also doubles as a mobility tool.
• The Cold Tal Rasha proc will come from Familiar Icicle. The skill also adds a minor, automated source of crowd control, which can prove useful at times.
• Magic Weapon Deflection will provide an additional shielding buffer, necessary to safeguard your Squirt's Necklace buff (see Cube section below).
• In the passives, you should keep Audacity (proximity-based damage multiplication), Elemental Exposure (element-based damage multiplication), and Illusionist ( Teleport resets) from the GR progression spec, as they retain their usefulness. You should, however, avoid overkilling on damage and drop Arcane Dynamo. In its stead, use Galvanizing Ward: a shielding passive, which lends itself well to overpowering the content in GR speeds.

The Tal Rasha's Elements set remains gloriously adaptable in GR speeds, and you should largely keep the same split between pieces as you do in Greater Rift solo progression: 5 pieces of Tal's, plus utility inclusions. It is recommended that you keep wearing the 2 pieces of the craftable Aughild set ( Aughild's Power and Aughild's Search), as they still produce valuable damage increasing and damage reducing properties.

Utility slots can also vary according to your overall strength, as well as whether you play solo or in a group — as you have to take care of certain bonuses that are usually relegated to the follower yourself when partying up. The bracer and shoulder slots — usually occupied by Aughild pieces — can also be taken by Ranslor's Folly (for supremely strong, pixel-tight pulling effect you can exert over trash mobs), and either the Act I bounty cache legendary Pauldrons of the Skeleton King (for the extra cheat death proc in solo play), or Homing Pads (for the safety during town portal when partying up). In order to make this combo viable however, you will need to use Energy Twister Wicked Wind over Diamond Skin Prism, making resource management considerably harder. Still, you gain supremely strong, on-demand CC from the Ranslor's Folly pulls, which can make all the difference in your GR speed clears.

In your jewelry, you should keep Halo of Karini for the ubiquitous damage reduction it provides, as well as the damage multiplication Convention of Elements — though you can consider dropping the latter for a Fire damage Stone of Jordan, if you prefer a consistent (if weaker) bonus over a timing-sensitive one. Use Squirt's Necklace as your amulet; its damage multiplication bonus will be safeguarded by the stacking shields of Magic Weapon Deflection and Galvanizing Ward.

Similarly to the Greater Rift solo progression setup, your weapon needs to stay on the Meteor-dedicated legendary staff The Grand Vizier.

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 aiming for the Storm Armor Sanctification, which adds the following power to your build:

• Storm Armor Sanctification: Your Storm Armor charges over 30 seconds. Casting Storm Armor at full charge releases a powerful thunderbolt, instantly killing a random enemy within 30 yards. Bosses and Elites are not killed but take significant damage.

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, a good candidate for Sanctification is your weapon, The Grand Vizier.

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.

Both Esoteric Alteration and Bane of the Trapped still bring excellent damage reduction and damage multiplication bonuses, respectively. Within the limited challenges of Speed Greater Rifts, Bane of the Stricken should be replaced by Bane of the Powerful for a well-rounded damage increase and damage mitigation bonus, with a duration-based (but very generous and manageable) limitation.

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

Considering its massive damage multiplication and taunting property, The Smoldering Core is still a mandatory inclusion in Greater Rift speed farming as well.

Moved from the equipped pieces to the Cube in order to free up a slot for Squirt's, Mempo of Twilight is nevertheless a mandatory inclusion for the tremendous damage bonuses and rune advantages it provides to Meteor.

In order to maintain the amalgamation of the Tal Rasha and Aughild sets, as well as a slew of synergistic legendary items, you need to keep the Ring of Royal Grandeur in the jewelry slot of the Cube.

The recommended follower for this build during GR speed farming is the Enchantress, due to her cooldown reduction bonus (cutting down Teleport downtime) and elemental damage increase. Note that this requires that you run Hand of the Prophet and optimize her survivability, as per our guide.

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.