Hey guys, I'm here to share with you my build for Wizard and to hopefully guide you to success.
First off, let me answer why you should use this build.
1. In single-target fights, you are pretty much invulnerable, leaving you to build full glass-cannon.
2. Ridiculous DPS.
3. Wizards are rad. Wizrad.

Skills
In case you don't know what Wizards are capable of!

Ice Bolt - You shoot a bolt at your target. Yay. Use this as filler.
Charged Bolts - Your best damaging spell. Hits quite a few times, procs Mirror Images on every hit, and melts enemies. Use this as much as possible.
Frost Nova - Roots everything on screen. Somewhat less useful than you think because a lot of mobs default to casting spells at you while they are rooted and spells HURT. However, if you're fighting 1v1, you can combo this with Counterspell for a pseudo-stun.
Magic missiles - Launches a barrage of missiles that do approximately 0.3 damage. Pretty useless. I think I've casted this spell a total of 3 times.
Vizier's Shielding - A buff that gives you health, armor, and resistances! Yay! Keep this up always(duh).
Deep Freeze - Freezes your target, your next attack does 100% extra damage and breaks the freeze. I use this as CC for any adds I don't want to deal with.
Chain Lightning - Hits your primary target and chains up to 6 times to adjacent targets. Does extra damage if it hits only one target. Pretty high damage single-target and good in AoE as well. I like to use this with Harness Ether in my opener for boss fights. Use this whenever its off cooldown and you don't need to cast Charged Bolts.
Glacial Spike - AoE Freeze. Keep in mind frozen targets take 25% extra damage. This ability is AMAZING. It gives you 25% more damage WHILE AoE stunning. However, it only freezes targets nearby your main target, so keep that in mind as well.
Ice Block - Gives you 10 seconds of invulnerability and heals you for every second you are in it. You can't cast anything while in Ice Block, however. This is a great way to "reset" a fight. You basically pause and stall for your cooldowns. Use this whenever you run out of Mirror Images and they're on cooldown for a while.
Ice Comet - You summon a comet to hit your target and slow them. Not that high of damage, but still pretty useful. I use this whenever I don't have anything else to do.
Counterspell - You silence a target for 6 seconds. This is an AMAZING spell. Better than any kick. As previously mentioned, you can use this with Frost Nova for a pseudo-stun.
Harness Ether - Amplifies the damage of your next spell and gives you mana regen until you cast that spell. I use this with Chain Lightning on bosses just to do more damage.
Mirror Images - Creates 5 Mirror Images that cast the spells you do for a fraction of the damage. Also, each Mirror Image can absorb one attack for you. This spell is what makes you "tanky". Keep this up as much as possible and, if possible, don't recast this until you use up all your mirror images.
Meteor - Hits all targets for a good amount of damage and leaves lava pool that does AoE damage over time. Use this while Chain Lightning and Charged Bolts are on cooldown.

Comboing
I want to get this out of the way first: I do not combo or chain mobs. Once you have your main two abilities maxed(Charged Bolt and Chain Lightning), you onehit everything until Hell with only a 4 second cooldown.
Here's why:
1. 4 second CD on your Charged Bolts is the perfect time to cast, kill a mob, click through the statistics box, and pull another mob.
2. It's more mentally exhausting to have to manage comboing mobs. I usually play while watching something on my other monitor. It's much harder to play my character at it's best while also paying attention to dialogue, plot, etc. Plus, it makes the grind less tedious.
3. If you get hit at ALL, you lose a Mirror Images stack, which means less damage, which means you don't oneshot mobs, which means you lose out on efficiency because you need to use two spells instead of one.
This is my personal preference, you can combo if you want to, but I personally don't think it's worth it unless you are farming content that is very easy.

Talents
Alrighty, so here's the basic build up to the point of writing this(at level 87):


Start off with maxing Charged Bolts. This skill does ridiculous damage to the point where I oneshotted all normal mobs up to Hell. It's your best skill and you better like it.

Max Chain Lightning next because it's good for burst and AoE. Not that you need AoE. The most important part about maxing this is the passive it gives. It halves the cooldown on your Mirror Images and all your lightning skills. This pretty much means you do double damage since Chain Lightning and Charged Bolts are about 90% of your DPS. You will notice a HUGE powerspike once maxing this skill. It's debatable whether you should max Chain Lightning or Charged Bolts first, unfortunately I haven't tested it.

Whether you maxed Charged Bolts or Chain Lightning first, you should max out Mirror Images third. It increases all lightning damage by 15% and Mirror Images themselves make up a huge portion of your damage.

After those three, we're done with the lightning side. Now, move on down the middle skill line and max out Glacial Spike. This gives you 50% reduction on your cold-based spells. Most importantly, 50% cooldown reduction on Glacial Spike, which is a 7 second freeze. Keep in mind you deal 25% additional damage to frozen targets as well.

After Glacial Spike, I decided to max Vizier's Shielding because I felt I had enough damage(way too much, actually). This will give you a good amount of health and resistances, which is always a good thing just in case you need to fight 2+ targets.

Leveling
Not much to be said for early leveling, just spam Ice Bolt and Charged Bolts until things fall over.

Once you have maxed Charged Bolts and Chain Lightning(late 30s), you should notice that your Charged Bolts are pretty much onehitting everything on a 4 second cooldown. Like I said in the comboing section of this guide, just pull one mob, kill it, and reset so you keep your Mirror Images at max stacked.

Once in Hell, things change up a bit. You no longer onehit mobs with Charged Bolts!
Instead, use Glacial Spike -> Charged Bolts and Chain Lightning -> Charged Bolts. Either of these combos should pretty much kill anything or leave them low enough to finish off with Static Bolts. Most importantly, mobs shouldn't be able to take a stack of Mirror Images off of you.

Boss Fights
This is what you excel at! 1v1 boss fights are easy as long as you follow these instructions. Of course, make sure you're buffed up with Mirror Images and Vizier's shield before the fight.
Before the fight, wait until Mirror Images are nearly off cooldown(5 seconds or so). This way you have 5 stacks of Mirror Images already up and it'll be off cooldown before you need them. The buff duration is longer than the cooldown.

Here's my opener:
1. Open with Glacial Spike.
2. Charged Bolts
3. Harness Ether a Chain Lightning
4. Meteor
5. Charged Bolts
6. Ice Comet

From here, use Mirror Images when you run out of them. Use Glacial Spike off cooldown and try to align your refresh Mirror Images with Glacial Spike. This is so that you get a 5 images Charged Bolts off, which gives a lot more damage. Always try to follow up your Mirror Images with a Charged Bolts. Use Frost Nova and Counterspell together to bide time until your Glacial Spike is back up if you need to. Deep Freeze any adds the boss spawns. Ice Block if you somehow run out of images while it's still on cooldown and you have no CC. Use all your damage abilities in this priority: Charged Bolts > Chain Lightning > Meteor > Ice Comet > Static Bolt.

Here's a video demonstrating this tactic vs. Hell Nalatos.


Items
The luxury of this build is that you can build full glass cannon.
You need int most importantly. The only defensive stats you should really need or look for are silence/fear reduction. They're not necessary since you should be able to survive a full duration fear while taking no damage thanks to your Mirror images, but less time spent in CC is more time spent doing damage. And that means things die faster.
%Lightning damage is obviously fantastic as well.
I'll update this section later when I can give more information.


Hopefully this guide is useful to somebody. I urge everyone to try a wizard because they're a fun class to play and very rewarding to master.

I'll update this guide later to give more information and make it pretty.

Are you asking to be nerfed, or begging?

Don't let Maelfyn read this, or you're in trouble

I'll give Wizard a second try (I've leveled an Erudite Wizard up to middle 20s in local mode before server went up), what race do you recommend?

In seriousness, I have been thinking about Wizard. If things go wrong, Wizards can be in a lot of trouble and die easily. They're like magic versions of Rogues. So I think they require pretty good skill to play. Do you suppose they are OP now? I doubt it, but the recent change to Charged Bolts definitely helped a lot. It possibly hits too hard?

A little spoiler, btw: Gnomes are getting silence immunity.

Btw, thanks for these vids. I'm almost positive the positioning of glacial spike is off-center and needs to be fixed.

I've got my answer

None of these videos work for me for whatever reason, maybe it's being blocked by malwarebytes or something.

Anyway, I know wizard survivability doesn't seem great (no leech, mirror image only does so much) so them being OP really comes down to them doing absurd dps (5k+). What's the dps like in the videos?

6005.4 DPS for his Hell Natalos video

I'm not sure why that video wouldn't work... It's hosted on YouTube. ~6k on Nalatos with semi-ok gear at level 87. Mirror Images + Glacial Spike make you mostly immune in single-target if you have both reduced cooldowns and play it properly. I think the most I've seen was 15k vs a hell mob with 19k hp, I critted with almost everything with Charged Bolts and it just dropped.


I like Dark Elf quite a lot, it gives you another way to "reset" a fight since you can heal from low health all the way to full. However, a lot of racials are going to change soon so any information I can really give you is going to be outdated.

I'm entirely ok with this. 6k sustained is perfectly reasonable for a single target glass cannon type spec. Have you tried chaining at all? Perhaps try Arcturin Crypt 1 in nightmare and see if you can get a real big chain going and post the battle results.

Edit: Video works, I had to pull the url out of the page source code to get to it but I finally saw it. Looks fun and very dependent on skill rotation.

Wizard is a friggn glasscannon. If you can't handle a good timed stun, you are dead meat. Instantly.
For that he NEEDS a big output. And it's also almost just the burst. If a fight lasts longer than 10 seconds, he is dead, too.

hah, Indeed - only option is to pop ice block and wait for your cooldowns to come back up and burst again.. after that you're pretty screwed

/fitzor

Only if you're fighting multiple things at once. If two champion/elite mobs with 50k+ hp come up at once and they're not near each other for Glacial Spike, you're pretty screwed. They'll eat through your mirror images and start shredding you too fast for you to do very much.
Whenever I had to fight bosses that come in twos(like the Braxxen fight), it was pretty much just a race to kill one of them so that when you die and retry it you can have a single-target fight. Unfortunately, due to how Charged Bolts and Chain Lightning work, you lose a lot of single-target damage when you fight 2 or more things. However, once you actually do have a single-target fight, nothing can hurt you except DoTs as long as you play it properly.

TL;DR In single-target fights, wizards are godmode. In 2+ target fights, you should be spamming shift + r.

I hope you are relishing that perfectly centered glacial spike, today.

My 79 Wiz (HC) found it out the hard way vs. the Dark Seer and his champ buddy
My fault too, was getting too cocky, Hell reminded me why it's called as it is...

Oh well, time to reroll

Thanks for nice writeup. I leveled a wizard with your plan, and it works great. I have the 6-piece set bonus, and the chain lightning 50% damage buff seems pretty underwhelming from what I've seen so far. For comparison, a Harness Ether - Chain Lightning still isn't as strong as a regular Charged Bolt. I don't know if this is intended, but Chain Lightning just seems like another mediocre filler spell to use while Charged Bolts is on cooldown.

The flat +20% magic damage bonus from the set is good though. Also, the 5-piece bonus for the summoners set gives +12% lightning damage, and you can actually wear the 6-piece Malefactor's and 5-piece Summoner at the same time. I don't know if this is the optimal gearing setup, but it's cool that you can wear two sets at the same time that seem to be synergistic.

edit: Chain Lightning with set vs Charged bolts observation is with 20 pts in both, but 0 points in Harness Ether...if that matters.

I feel that Charged Bolts is better vs. single target, and Chain Lightning works best when there are 2(or more) mobs close togheter. But yes, overall CB is the best Wiz skill hands down.

That's interesting because I came to a similar build conclusion on my own after doing a ton of point respecs to test a variety of combinations out. The above build is absolutely the most effective Wizard build at the moment. Charged bolts got its # of hits cut in half, IMO it was justified, because that skill was way too OP for a 4 sec cooldown. But even after the charged bolts nerf, this is still the best Wizard build. I'm still hitting for upwards of 20k with charged bolts even with the # of hits cut in half. That's how OP it was!! Imagine 40k+ for a 4 sec CD? That's 10k+ DPS per sec if you just stand still and only use CB!! I haven't played every class yet, but yeeesh I haven't seen anything close to that OP for a skill.

Here is my level 78 Wizard:

http://nevergrind.com/nevergrounds/inde ... er=Regulus

I'm basically going with the same build as TC.

Now I've ran into issues in hell mode vs double boss fights. In the Burzina double boss fight, it took me about 6 attempts, it was particularly complicated because of 2 bosses and 2 pets. Start the fight, freeze one, glacial spike and attack the one with lower HP. I was having to pump static bolts, ice comet, and fireball, because charged bolts or chain lightning will break the other boss out of the ice. When my CD's came back up I did blast them both with CB and Chain lightning, then I'd glacial spike & freeze then repeat. The pets should die after a single cast of charged bolts + chain lightning. Using this strategy you should at the very minimum be able to pick 1 of the bosses off before you're dead, but that's not a viable HC strategy. In HC the same strategy would work if you had awesome gear. I feel like the gear on my Wizard is mediocre to bad for level 78. Even then, he's more effective than my SK which is in desperate need of a good 2H. Hoping to get lucky and find an elite tier 2h unique of some sort on my wizard. That or find a dagger upgrade for my rogue. I'm glad I can't faceroll hell mode, and have to prod around a bit and see how far I can get before I hit a wall, hoping to find something that will make one of my other builds more effective.