Vyr Archon Wizard Greater Rift Speed Farming Variation

The Vyr Archon Wizard can deal reasonably well with Greater Rift Speed Farming, mostly thanks to the great mobility offered by the Teleport rune of Archon gained via the 2-piece bonus. This is also the build variation you should use for Echoing Nightmare content, with no additional changes required. 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
Arcane Torrent Static Discharge Magic Weapon Deflection 1 Archon Slow Time 2 Explosive Blast Flash 3 Black Hole Absolute Zero 4 Storm Armor Shocking Aspect
Passive Skills
Evocation Audacity Unstable Anomaly 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.

Before starting the farming run, apply the two protective buffs — Storm Armor Shocking Aspect and Magic Weapon Deflection. For your first Archon rotation, get some Chantodo stacks (10 should be more than enough, no need to fully stack) via Explosive Blast and Arcane Torrent, then enter Archon form. Focus on trash enemies on your first rotation; while elite kills are nice, you depend on the Messerschmidt's Reaver for cooldown resets, and its power hinges on the number, not power, of monsters killed. For subsequent Archon re-activations, you should get to the 20 stack cap of Chantodo's set. This will be assisted by both Explosive Blast and Arcane Torrent, as their effects persist between forms and still get you stacks for the next activation.

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.

• Archon naturally stays as the focal point of the build, taken with the Cold rune Slow Time.
• Explosive Blast Flash will take the place of the GR progression-oriented Slow Time to build you up Chantodo stacks faster. This goal will be shared by Arcane Torrent Static Discharge and Black Hole as well, with the latter adding a decent damage buff via the Cold rune Absolute Zero.
• Magic Weapon Deflection and Storm Armor Shocking Aspect will remain at the core of your defensive setup, each bringing its own flavor of damage mitigation to the build — the former in combination with Galvanizing Ward, and the latter — through its interaction with Halo of Karini. Once you grow confident with the build, you can viably alternate your Storm Armor rune to the movespeed-oriented Scramble.
• The core of your passives, the multiplicative close range damage buff of Audacity and the Cooldown Reduction of Evocation, remain part of your passive lineup. Galvanizing Ward adds a hefty shield to protect you and your Squirt's Necklace from unlucky bursts of damage, while Unstable Anomaly will grant you a cheat death whenever something punches through said defenses.

You will still be taking advantage of the full 6-piece set bonuses of Vyr, but you will only take 5 set pieces and get the complete bonus through a Ring of Royal Grandeur. This allows you to wear The Swami on your character, and take advantage of the extra elemental damage and powerful crowd control of Frostburn in the Cube armor slot. To complement the Archon build, you will maintain the Chantodo's Resolve set — Chantodo's Will and Chantodo's Force as your main- and off-hand.

Item stat priorities remain largely the same as the GR progression build — with a focus on Toughness stats across gear, cooldown reduction wherever possible, and eschewing all Area Damage bonuses, as they do not work on Archon skills.

The jewelry remains unchanged from the GR progression setup. With the opportunity to equip The Flavor of Time and Nemesis Bracers on your follower and use their powers via the Emanate mechanic when soloing, you can still maintain the valuable bonuses of Squirt's Necklace and Ashnagarr's Blood Bracer from the progression build. If you plan on grouping up however, use The Flavor of Time to extend the duration of Pylon pick-ups, and equip Nemesis Bracers to be able to spawn additional elites on your own.

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, good candidates for Sanctification are your weapon ( Chantodo's Will) and your off-hand ( Chantodo's Force).

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 helpful in ramping up Chantodo bonuses and keeping your CDR sky-high in order to return to Archon form as soon as possible; if you are well-optimized on CDR on gear however, you should use Zei's Stone of Vengeance to maximize damage.

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.

Messerschmidt's Reaver is a cooldown reduction powerhouse that allows you to reduce the perilous Archon downtime through trash kills — a trivial task once you get stacks going inside lower tier Greater Rifts. An even more daredevil, but nevertheless viable alternative for this slot, is the attack- and movement speed amplifier Echoing Fury.

Storing Frostburn in the armor slot of the Cube nets you another source of increased elemental damage and, more importantly, a powerful crowd control effect for your Cold skills (synergistic with this Cold version of Archon).

In order to complete the 6-piece bonus of the Vyr set, you will have to use a 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 cooldown reduction- and increased attack speed bonuses, both of which are helpful to the needs of an attack speed- and CDR-heavy build such as this one.

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 Tower, whose Armor-increasing properties complement the shield-based defenses of this build, as well as the naturally high All Resistances stat of Wizards (due to Intelligence scaling resistances) for optimal survivability.