Firebird Meteor Wizard Guide

1. Do the Challenge Rift for the materials to cube Legendary Powers. You can complete this once a week for additional resources and we always update the guide for you!

2. Gather the full Firebird's Finery set. Each piece can be gambled from Kadala for Bloodshards. Do not salvage any duplicate pieces you find! Instead convert them to another part of the set with Recipe 4 in Kanai's Cube. If you have extra materials you can use Recipe 3 to craft the remaining pieces, but this is expensive and not recommended for new players.

3. Gamble from Kadala in this order:

1. The full Firebird's Finery set
2. Mempo of Twilight
3. Nilfur's Boast
4. Halo of Karini and Convention of Elements

4. Craft using Recipe 3 in Kanai's Cube in this order:

1. Staves to get The Smoldering Core and The Grand Vizier
2. Amulets to get Squirt's Necklace
3. Anything from the Gamble list in Step 3 that you haven't already acquired.
   
   

5. Do Bounties to acquire several important items for this build:

• Act 1: Ring of Royal Grandeur
• Act 4: Can drop any bounty item from any act
• Bounty Turn In: Recipes for Captain Crimson's Trimmings and Guardian's Jeopardy
  
  

6. There is one final required piece that is difficult to acquire, Squirt's Necklace. With amulets being so expensive to gamble and craft, we'll have to search for it to drop in Nephalem and Greater Rifts. The biggest hint is to party up with other players and kindly ask them to drop any duplicates they find.

7. Use Primordial Ashes in Kanai's Cube with the new Curiosity of Lorath Nahr recipe to obtain a free Crafted Primal Ancient. Since you can only equip one of them, choosing the right item to focus matters! Great candidates are Weapons, Offhands, Jewelry or any item with an important multiplier. With that in mind, we recommend getting one of the following items:

• Bane of the Stricken helps us kill the Rift Guardian. As long as you don't need more than 2 minutes to kill it you can equip Bane of the Powerful instead.
• Bane of the Trapped (BotT) grants us a global separate 1.6 damage multiplier. It requires us to stand within 15 yards of our enemies to apply its effect, which is the same range we require for Audacity. On the Rift Guardian our Follower will continuously reapply a slow.
• Zei's Stone of Vengeance is another damage multiplier which complements perfectly Power Hungry.
• Molten Wildebeest's Gizzard can be used in Solo Speeds instead of Bane of the Powerful for more shields to keep up Squirt's Necklace.

• Disintegrate is purely used to activate Firebird's Finery bonuses, hitting monsters with this skill builds Combustion stacks to reduce our Teleport Cooldown and buff our Meteor damage.
• Meteor Comet is our main damaging ability.
• Teleport is our mobility skill whose Cooldown is reduced to the minimum 0.5 second cooldown due to the Firebird's Finery (4) Bonus.
• Storm Armor is the activator for Halo of Karini. Without this buff you will be squashed like a fly, so make sure to keep it up.
• Diamond Skin Prism is used for defensive purposes but also to reduce the Meteor Resource Cost.
• Blackhole Absolute Zero is used for a massive elemental damage buff before our Cold Convention of Elements cycle.

• Elemental Exposure is a separate and global multiplier debuffing each target once for each element (Fire, Cold, Arcane, Lighting) for up to 5 seconds when you hit it with said target. The elemental type of the damage range on your equipped weapon will also be applied with each ability that you hit with.
• Power Hungry provides us with a separate 1.3 multiplier on target further than 30 yards away.
• Galvanizing Ward is our main defensive passive for variants using Squirt's Necklace, to protect its 100% separate damage multiplier.
• The last passive can be:
  • Conflagration to apply a nice 6% Critical Hit Chance debuff on monsters with Disintegrate Convergence.
  • Unstable Anomaly for another cheat death mechanic on top of the (2) Bonus.
  • Blur for some decent flat mitigation.

¹ Aim for a decent HP pool (~1,000,000 Life in Solo Push) as your Shields (Galvanizing Ward and Diamond Skin) scale with it.

The Altar of Rites is a tree that grants tremendous powers to your entire account in exchange for sacrifices. It requires you to farm Bounties, kill the Ubers, craft the Staff of Herding, and more. Completing all 26 of these tasks, along with sacrificing 6 Primal Ancients grants you extra Damage, Defense, Quality of Life, Increased Drops and 3 Potion Super Powers. Read the full guides on Unlocking the Altar and the Altar Mechanics by Raxxanterax and Chewingnom to learn everything about this fantastic mechanic!

Optimal Path

Patch 2.7.0 revamped the follower system giving all 3 hirelings new powers and the emanate system. The first thing you should do is read our complete follower guide and remember the key takeaways:

1. The emanation system allows followers to share certain legendary and set powers with you. The most important ones are: The Flavor of Time, Nemesis Bracers, Avarice Band, Sage’s Journey and Cain’s Destiny. Click the guide above for the full list.
2. Follower’s powers are based on their main stat (maxed at 25,000, but they have a 2.5x multiplier so you only need 10,000). This means we stack Intelligence on the Enchantress, Dexterity on the Scoundrel and Strength on the Templar.
3. Guardian's Jeopardy (3) Bonus works for followers by improving their inherent stat multiplier from x2.5 to x3.5, making it slightly easier to hit the 25,000 main stat threshold if needed.
4. Followers share 20% of their Experience, Magic and Gold Find stats with you.
5. Legendary gems do not work on followers, except Esoteric Alteration and Mutilation Guard.
6. Cooldown Reduction does not work for any follower skill except the Templar’s Heal.
7. Followers never deal significant damage; you’re on your own to clear the content.

Select Follower

The general playstyle for pushing Greater Rifts with Firebird's Finery Comet is pretty straightforward once you get all your buffs running. The first thing to do before moving is casting Disintegrate for 2 seconds in order to build your Combustion stacks granting you 80% damage reduction and a 0.5 second Teleport Cooldown. Use Teleport to get the Safe Passage 25% damage reduction.

The only thing left for you to do is to Teleport around and bodypull enemies together using Disintegrate. A few seconds before your Cold Convention of Elements cycle starts:

• Set up on a pull of monsters with Teleport.
• Spam some Comets to stack up The Smoldering Core.
• Make sure at least one target is ignited to activate the Firebird's Finery (6) Bonus damage multiplier.
• Before your Cold cycle, cast Black Hole Absolute Zero to lock monsters and group them up while getting a huge elemental damage buff for 10 seconds.
• Make sure to cast Diamond Skin Prism for your burst to protect Galvanizing Ward but also to reduce the Arcane Power cost of Comet. Outside of your Cold cycle, use it to help refresh Galvanizing Ward.
• Spam Comet to kill monsters!

Firebird's Finery builds are a good choice for Hardcore players as the (2) Bonus provides a free cheat death every 60 seconds and the (4) Bonus grants you 80% damage reduction as long as you keep at least 1 Combustion stack. The set also allows us to get a 0.5 second Cooldown Teleport for a huge mobility to escape danger at any time and, last but not least, Shields mechanics are used with Galvanizing Ward and Diamond Skin Prism for another layer of defense to guarantee you'll never die! Check out our dedicated Hardcore Survival Guide to learn more about how to succeed in this game mode!

• Most of these mechanics are irrelevant for this build which only takes advantage of the Firebird's Finery damage multiplier to deal damage with Meteor.
• The Meteor that revives you from the Firebirds Finery (2) Bonus has a 60 second internal cooldown (ICD) and resets when you die.
• The Ignite DoT of Firebirds Finery (2) Bonus has a maximum range of 200 yards. Once you exceed this distance to an ignited enemy the DoT is removed from the target. The Ignite DoT is also removed when you change Greater Rift floors or die.
• You gain Combustion stacks from Firebird's Finery (4) Bonus very quickly when channeling Disintegrate. Combustion stacks decay at the rate of 2 per second.
• Teleport Cooldown is reduced by up to 100% at 50 Combustion stacks, but still has a minimum cooldown of 0.5 seconds.
• Ignite DoT benefit from "Fire skills deal X% more damage" and include Critical Hit Chance and Damage (1 + CHC * CHD) as a damage multiplier but cannot proc Area Damage. Like any DoT, crit debuffs applied on monsters such as Iceblink or Multishot Wind Chill doesn't work.
• Firebird's Finery (6) Bonus procs benefit from "Fire skills deal X% more damage" and can critically hit but cannot proc Area Damage. Crit debuffs like Iceblink or Conflagration does work.
• Firebird's Finery (6) Bonus cannot proc from effects with a proc coefficient of 0. Thus Etched Sigil and Wand of Woh procs do not trigger the (6) Bonus!
• Blizzard Apocalypse does not proc the (6) Bonus either.
• Pets such as Hydra and Mirror Images do not proc the (6) Bonus since a nerf in Season 25.

• In order to keep up your shields to survive while maintaining Squirt's Necklace damage multiplier, you need to learn to judge the incoming damage and how fast you can build those shields yourself, which requires practice.
• Shields have no direct UI indicator unless you mouseover your health globe.
• You can see that you have any shield up when you see a transparent blue bubble around your character (not the size of the shield, however).
• Because Wizard Shield values scale with your total life, Vitality and Life % stats become substantially better for toughness scaling compared to other builds.
• Galvanizing Ward is the main shielding mechanic used for most Wizard builds, which combined with Ashnagarr's Blood Bracer adds up to 120% of your total life as a shield. This shield will reset to its maximum value every 5 seconds if this shield in particular doesn't take any hit in the meantime.
• Spectral Blade Barrier Blades and Magic Weapon Deflection represent the secondary shielding mechanic of the Wizard and can be stacked as much as you like, but their shield value is set at 4% (up to 8% with Ashnagarr's Blood Bracer) of your total life and they only lasts for 3 seconds. The duration is counted for each stack individually. For this specific build iteration, we want to use Flame Blades.
• While Barrier Blades or Deflection (or any other shield in that matter) protect the Galvanizing Ward shield, it is possible to reset the shield gained from the passive to full even while taking hits.
• All of these mechanics make it so that when your shields start breaking or your Galvanizing Ward doesn't find enough time to reset, the whole setup will fall apart really quickly. Make sure you understand your limits and survivability in different situations.

• Each hit from Meteor on an enemy applies a debuff granting you a 50% separate damage multiplier, up to 3 stacks.
• Meteors from Tal Rasha's Elements (2) Bonus and Mempo of Twilight Meteor Shower effect are stacking the effect.
• This effect is a debuff on monsters, meaning another Wizard with The Smoldering Core equipped can stack the effect for other Wizards in the party but one has to equip it to benefit from the damage multiplier.
• The debuff stacks add up as one combined 150% separate damage multiplier.
• The debuff stacks have a duration of 5 seconds. All stacks have their duration refreshed on hit.
• The ground DoT effect of Meteor does not contribute to stacks.
• The lure effect means enemies are taunted by your Meteor Impacts and run towards them.

• Each stack is a debuff for one of the following elements: Arcane, Cold, Fire or Lightning.
• Each stack is unique and refreshes its own duration when reapplied.
• Any ability with a proc coefficient greater than zero applies a stack of its respective element. This inherently means that only selfcasted abilities grant stacks.
• The elemental range on the Weapon applies its respective stack with all abilities if the elemental range is of the type: Arcane, Cold, Fire or Lightning. This is why Item Stat Priorities state you want a weapon with Cold or Lightning Damage Range.
• The 5% damage from each stack is additive to each other adding up to a total of 20% separate damage multiplier.