LoD Twister 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. This is a Legacy of Dreams build whose success is heavily dependent on this gem's rank. The first order of business is to equip a Legendary or Set item in every slot to take advantage of its power. Make sure to not have any Set Bonuses equipped or the gem will be nullified and you will deal no damage! Farm speed Greater Rifts (in under 5 minute clears) to find the items and get this gem as high as possible. Above Rank 25 ancient pieces of gear will give you even greater power.

3. Gamble from Kadala in this order:

1. Ranslor's Folly
2. Etched Sigil
3. Nemesis Bracers
4. Goldwrap
5. Homing Pads
6. Ice Climbers
7. Ashnagarr's Blood Bracer
8. Stone Gauntlets
9. Aquila Cuirass
10. Mantle of Channeling
11. Leoric's Crown
12. Blackthorne's Jousting Mail

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

1. Swords to get The Twisted Sword
2. Staves to get Valthek's Rebuke
3. Wands to get Aether Walker
4. Rings to get Halo of Karini, Convention of Elements and Unity
5. Amulets to get Squirt's Necklace
6. 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 2: Gloves of Worship
• Act 3: Avarice Band and Pride's Fall
• Bounty Turn In: Recipes for Cosmic Strand, Sage's Journey and Cain's Destiny (for your follower)
  
  

6. At this point you can somewhat comfortably farm Nephalem or Speed Greater Rifts where you can find all the remaining items you need for different variants of the build. Spend your materials getting items with better rolls and/or ancient quality.

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:

• The Twisted Sword
• Etched Sigil
• Convention of Elements
• Halo of Karini

• Legacy of Dreams is the Legacy of Nightmares Set in a gem, which frees up two ring slots at the cost of removing Zeis Stone of Vengeance. Due to the rings available to us this is a great trade-off to take.
• 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 is equipped since it grants us a nice 1.6 global separate multiplier. We must, however, stand within 15 yards of our enemies to apply its effect when playing Wicked Wind, which is the same range we require for Audacity. On the Rift Guardian our Follower will continuously reapply a slow for BotT. However, Cold damage from Mistral Breeze chills the target and slows it before any damage instance is calculated meaning that BotT will always be applied.
• For Nephalem Rifts, Boon of the Hoarder is always a default include specifically due to its amazing synergy with Avarice Band.
• Lastly, Zei's Stone of Vengeance is a feasible choice which in contrary to its description, grants its first stage benefit at 0 yards and not 10 yards.

• Magic Weapon Deflection grants you a Shield with 4% of your maximum Life everytime you cast an ability. The shields are protecting your hit points from taking actual damage preserving the damage buff of Squirts Necklace.
• Arcane Torrent Flame Ward activates our channeling items Etched Sigil and Mantle of Channeling while granting us decent 25% damage reduction buff.
• Teleport Safe Passage provides us with a nice defensive buff each time we use it. We are not using Illusory Boots, which is why we need at least one source of movability (often combined with Illusionist).
• Storm Armor is needed to proc the defensive capabilities of Halo of Karini. Shocking Aspect has the best overall uptime by giving you a second chance on a crit while Power of the Storm grants a nice flat Resource Cost Reduction of 3 Arcane Power to all abilities.
• Energy Twister is played with the stationary Arcane Wicked Wind in push for its consistency and with the moving Cold Mistral Breeze in speeds.
• Wave of Force Arcane Attunement constitutes an incredible separate multiplier for Wicked Wind specifically with the pixelpulling capabilities of Ranslors Folly.

• Elemental Exposure is a separate and global multiplier debuffing each target once for each element (Fire, Cold, Arcane, Lightning) for up to 5 seconds when you hit it with said target. The elemental type of your the damage range on your equipped weapon will also be applied with each ability that you hit with.
• Audacity provides us with a separate 1.3 multiplier if and only if our target is within 15 yards.
• Galvanizing Ward grants a massive shield leading to better Squirts Necklace uptime in conjunction with Ashnagarrs Blood Bracer.
• Illusionist provides us with some mobility via Teleport. This passive also procs when you take 15% of your maximum Life as damage on your shields.
• Other options can include:
  • Unwavering Will for some damage and mitigation.
  • Conflagration with Arcane Torrent Flame Ward for some damage.
  • Blur for some decent flat mitigation.

¹ Aim for a decent HP pool (~800,000 Life in Solo Push) as your Shields (Galvanizing Ward and Deflection) 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 LoD Twister is definitely more complicated than for the average build due to some Energy Twister mechanics, but that's nothing a Wizard can't handle:

1. Maintain your Buffs: When you enter the Greater Rift you want to cast Storm Armor and Magic Weapon; make sure that this buffs won't time out on you.
2. Prepare a Pull: You goal is to unleash one very large Twister (total of 5 instances) buffed via Wave of Force Arcane Attunement (WoF). To maximize your WoF stacks you should apply the following strategy:
   1. Body pull enemies; make sure to not use Energy Twister due the Ranslors Folly knockback.
   2. Cast Wave of Force Arcane Attunement such that you maximize the number of stacks you gain.
   3. The WoF buff does not time out and it only needs to be applied to the first Energy Twister (the parent) you cast. Be careful to not use Arcane Torrent at this stage, since any Arcane Energy Twister casted by Etched Sigil will consume your WoF stacks.
3. Damage Phase:
   1. Two seconds into your Convention of Elements (CoE) Lightning cycle selfcast an Energy Twister (the parent) right in the center of your pull. It must be a selfcast since only a selfcasted parent Energy Twister is eligible to proc Area Damage.
   2. Start channeling Arcane Torrent on top of the parent Energy Twister; preferably the channel begins one second before your CoE Arcane cycle and ends one second before CoE Cold begins.
4. Scout and Pull: Scout for Pylons, pull monsters and start repeating from step 1 until the Rift Guardian spawns.
5. Rift Guardian: Hold down Arcane Torrent on single target Rift Guardians. For Rift Guardians with minions you want to at least selfcast the parent Energy Twister.

The playstyle is definitely something you have to get used to; it's fast paced, strategic and very sensitive towards sequencing. Make sure to train it a couple of times in town - especially timing your Convention of Elements is crucial. The biggest mistakes you should avoid are the following:

• Don't rely purely on Energy Twister cast by Etched Sigil for anything - except on the Rift Guardian fight. Your first Twister (the parent) must be selfcasted.
• Don't continuously DPS by simply holding down Arcane Torrent. This is a "rotation based" burst build requiring precise pixelpulling, managing Wave of Force and bursting trash with Area Damage in CoE Arcane cycle.

Rotate out Elemental Exposure for Unstable Anomaly. You are already insanely tanky; so technically speaking the switch is not needed. Check out our dedicated Hardcore Survival Guide to learn more about how to succeed in this game mode!

• The first placed Energy Twister (the parent) snapshots Absolute Zero, Spellsteal, Arcane Attunement.
• Any consecutive Twister, which merges into the parent, will adapt all multipliers from its parent.
• It does not matter for any consecutive Twister, which merges into the parent, whether it's selfcasted or casted by Etched Sigil.
• Each time the parent grows from a merge its duration is reset.
• Each parent can be merged a maximum of 4 times.
• Each time a Twister merges into a parent, the traveling direction of the parent can change even if Valtheks Rebuke is equipped.

• Etched Sigil has an Internal Cooldown (ICD) of 59 frames.
• An Energy Twister can only spawn when Arcane Torrent, Ray of Frost or Disintegrate ticks and Etched Sigil is off cooldown.
• You can spawn one Energy Twister every 60 frames when your channeling abilities' Breakpoint is a divider of 60 (2 FPA, 3 FPA, 4 FPA, 5 FPA, 6 FPA, 10 FPA, 12 FPA, 15 FPA, 20 FPA, 30 FPA). On other Breakpoints your Etched Sigil will have a longer cooldown.
• The first Energy Twister (the parent) must be selfcasted. It does not matter for any consecutive Twister that merges into the parent if it's selfcasted or not. Twisters cast by Etched Sigil cannot proc Area Damage. That is due to the fact that only a selfcasted Energy Twister can proc Area Damage.
• Any Arcane Energy Twister rune casted by Etched Sigil (when channeling) will consume Wave of Force Arcane Attunement stacks.

• 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.
• 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.

• Is a separate multiplier for any Arcane ability.
• Has a maximum cap of 125 targets which equals a 6.0 multiplier.
• The character is buffed when the "Wave" stops traveling. Any Arcane ability casted while the Wave is still traveling will not consume Arcane Attunement. This means Black Hole Spellsteal can be cast immediately after Wave of Force Arcane Attunement without consuming the resulting WoF stacks. This needs some practice to pull off!
• In combination with The Twisted Sword, only the first Arcane Energy Twister needs to be buffed by Wave of Force Arcane Attunement. The four additional merges will not remove the buff.

• Pulls normal monsters only and pixelpull them ignoring their hitboxes. Ranslor's Folly tries to pull enemies within 30 yards twice a second. This is extremely useful to benefit from Area Damage.
• This will usually work best when cast on an empty spot somewhere between all of the monsters you would like to pull. Certain monsters does not stack very well when the spot you cast on is already occupied.
• Due to the Crowd Control Resistance, you can't pull enemies together endlessly. Try to get everything in with a single cast.

• Each stack is a debuff for one of the following elements: Arcane, Cold, Fire or Lightning.
• Each stack is unique and will refresh 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 Damage Range.
• The 5% damage from each stack is additive to each other adding up to a total of 20% separate damage multiplier.

• Energy Twisters builds are a force to be reckon with for a very long time on Console versions of the game, the main reason being that channeling mechanics are very different on Console: it is possible to cast any skill while channeling without interruption.
• In practice, this means one can fully maintain Deathwish, Etched Sigil and Mantle of Channeling damage multipliers while endlessly selfcasting Energy Twisters without any inconvenience, effectively skyrocketing the damage output of the build.