I LOVE Disintegrate - MP10 Disintegrate Build possible?

  • #1
    I basicly quit after killing Diablo on inferno after beeing forced to use Venom Hydra + Blizzard spec at the release. It was not fun.

    I am eager to come back but I am not interested in the "critical mass - tornado - frost nova" builds either.

    I want Disintegrate to be the core of my build. Not because it is best, but because it is FUN.

    Is this possible to acutally go for this in MP10? How would the spec be? What stats would I focus on?
  • #2
    there is two main problems with disintegrate as is (and i love this spell and keep trying to make it work).

    One is that you need to be stationary and frankly you need enough life return and resistances to make it work. The other problem is AP. You will need a solid amount of APoC so your beam can continue to function.

    If you can do these two things then MP10 no problem. The catch is if you gear is that good then most other major builds (archon - which is glorified disintegrate so try that, WWCM, etc) will probably be stronger.

    As i am playing archon right now i kinda get my fix for both (but at high MP levels its just a massive burst spell with a >2 minute cd because of CM).

    The only other build i used was a teleport disintegrate build which allowed me to bounce back and fire/repeat but AP regen is the major issue again. eventually you'll need to kite for a bit to regen that AP.

    The build was basically, arcane hydra, disintegrate - chaos nexus, teleport fracture, diamond skin - crystal shell, prismatic armour (storm armour for lower MPs), and magic weapon (either blood magic for health regen or force weapon for dps). Passives were the AP regen one, Temporal flux (more time to fire and works with the hydra), I tended toward blur for the last but illusionist works also. honestly the last one is up for grabs (I've used the AP on orbs as well cause well, more ap is more blasting.

    GL with the build... while MP10 farming is very hard with disintegrate lower MPs its just sooooo much fun.
  • #3
    mara;s amu, soj and skull grasp together can make disintegrate almost free with the minimum amount of apoc. but your on screen dps will be a bit lower due to those unless you are super rich and get those gg mara and skull grasp.
  • #4
    MP10 solo? In a word, no.

    If you have the DPS, it is quite easy to make a successful build basically turning yourself into a perma-archon with better mobility and utility for low MP farming with disintegrate and wormhole->teleport among others (I still like the width/length of the archon beam, though).

    In higher MPs, fights take way longer. This isn't necessarily an issue with arcane power if you have the right gear (minus disintegrate cost and/or slow 2her) and build. You will, however, be taking far, far more hits than a critical mass build, and you will be taking those hits without the increased EHP from archon. If your goal is to do ubers as a pure DPS while someone else tanks/stunlocks, that's fine, but then any build is fine in that situation.
  • #5
    The purpose of the MP system isn't so everyone plays at 10 - but so everyone plays in a way that is fun, choosing the difficult of enemies.

    The extra magic find, etc. isn't necessary - when you consider that you want to play a build that is fun, do so against enemies it can beat with a fun level of attention and your current gear, :)
  • #6
    MP10? Don't count on it.

    MP0-5 (for above average gear)? Sure. 6+? Less and less likely.

    Unless you have a million EHP and plenty of DPS, life steal, and AP reduction and/or regeneration, you're not going to be able to stand still to benefit from Disintegrate before getting mauled by high MP mobs.

    FYI, when I run Archon (which has a free to cast Disintegrate that also hits harder) on MP10, it's usually active for the 15 seconds before I have to rely on CM proccing spells to get it off cooldown. Archon also provides a huge boost to EHP. Relying solely on Disintegrate... not really viable.

    Oh, don't even bother pairing it with Diamond Skin as a way to bypass using Archon. You lose Diamond Skin - Crystal Shell on MP10 in about 2-3 hits from an elite pack (and this is with about 500K EHP).

    There's a reason why so many people run these builds, it's because they work. Other builds have been played around with (I've been testing Spectral Blades recently), but they're not reliable for the majority of mob confrontations.
    Blizzard Entertainment - Diablo III Community MVP
  • #7
    People vastly overestimate the AP requirements of Disintegrate. I've run builds for it at low MPs before, and Astral Presence, Power of the Storm, and 1 piece of cost reduction gear (and zero APoC) are plenty to ensure i never run out of AP on MP 0 through 4.

    The problem really is finding the EHP and life steal for higher MPs so you can spend much more time channeling. Having two cost reduction pieces to take care of your AP and running Prismatic or Force Armor is very helpful, but no rune of Disintegrate causes enough CM procs to use diamond skin or frost nova effectively enough for very long.

    I use the following for low MP farming in acts 1 and 2 where the mob density sometimes doesn't support archon:
  • #8
    I also tried to play around with Disintegrate recently and I second that trying to cope with its Arcane Power demand by getting more APoC pieces is not the best thing. Remember that APoC also means you need a very high crit value, eating up another affix slot.

    Another thing that people underestimate is LOW APS for Disintegrate; if you have low APS, Disintegrate ticks less often but much harder (the DPS will stay the same), reducing Arcane Power cost per second drastically. Basically, if you get some Arcane Power regeneration (Tal Rasha bonus, Astral Presence, Templar), very slow attack speed, and items that reduce Disintegrate cost (SoJ), you might be able to run it without CM after all.

    If you use CM, however, all these benefits turn against you - you want as many CM procs as possible to get more FN/DS casts and so on, and basically you end up building a variant of a CMWW spec rather than a Disintegrate-focused spec. To each his own.
  • #9
    ive been running a sort of disintegrate spec on my alt wizard, tho it is rly another variant of cm build. it basically involves building up 5 stacks of arcane dynamo wit living lightning then pop time warp and pewpew till arcane power runs out or disint got interrupted, then repeat from building up stacks. based upon testing against elite phasebeasts on mp5 it seems to be one of the more durable specs i have tested xD.
  • #10
    Quote from DisposableHeero


    I would put frost nova into RMB and put in sparkflint instead of hydra, and glass cannon instead of CM. If that's for low MP farming, you should be trying to melt everything instantly. I can understand frost nova for elites, but hydra is a waste of a click. Everything should be dead before it even attacks once. I can't imagine CM is causing enough procs for it to be worth it. Shouldn't even need to use DS or frost nova more than once per cooldown.
  • #11
    The last build I had with my wizard used Desintegrate - Entropy. He wasn't that well equipped, but did fine without APoC, as long as he didn't stand still and cast for >10sec. I did use astral presence though.

    Other Skills:
    - Prismatic armor
    - Frost Nova
    - Teleport (safe passage)
    - Slow Time (Enemies take 20% more dmg)
    - Mirror Image (duplicates)

    - Blur
    - Astral presence
    - Critical mass

    Something that helped was using a very slow 2h-weapon (less AP per second) with decent LL (2.80%) and LoH (1000).

    I personally am not sure if the other desintegrate runes are as viable, as they cover a smaller area. The range isn't much higher (Entropy range is higher than the visual effect suggests) but the damage is. Entropy also works very well with Slow time (often permanently up w/ CM) and frost nova.
  • #12
  • #13
    On it's own? No, I don't think Disintegrate is viable for high MP without a little support.

    I did play around yesterday in MP8 and 10 with a Disintegrate build that I do think is actually viable.

    One of the big reasons CM/WW is about the only option for high MP is because of the frequent (constant?) freezing from Frost Nova. Having Diamond Skin available all the time is helpful too. It's the only way to manage the incoming damage you take in MP8+ since I don't think it's really possible to become "tanky" enough do it just with stats... Or at least while maintaining DPS (Unless you have billions and billions of gold for gear I suppose). It's actually CM that is the more mandatory part of the CM/WW that you need for high MP.

    I actually found Disintegrate can proc CM reasonably fast, at least in certain circumstances (I was using Chaos Nexus in my build). It wasn't fast enough against single targets of course, but I didn't have any trouble keeping mobs of say 4 or more constantly frozen with Nova. I was also pulling in enough AP from crits that it was easily sustainable against the group of targets.

    I think the trick here is that the "slow" weapons often used to keep the AP cost down also make it not possible to crit fast enough to proc CM enough. In my case, I was running 1.83 APS with about 47CC and 19 APoC. You'd also need reasonably high DPS to be effective of course just because of the health pools on monsters. I was running about 195k DPS with the particular gear and skill set I tried.

    You will also want to have alternate combat options too. Small groups and elite packs (especially those that spread apart or run) can be real problems for adequate disintegrate uptime and CM proc. Obviously WW would be an alternate but I personally don't like it and it's really no better against the types of situations that give disintegrate issues. After playing around, it seems like only signature spell that can proc CM reasonably quickly is Living Lightning (I had high hopes for Forked Lightning but while it procs APoC fairly quickly, CM is not fast enough). LL has a bit of a duration and returns huge amounts of APoC so it makes Meteor pretty viable to combo with it. Between LL itself and the proc from the meteor pools, you can use the combo against even a single elite target.

    Basically, I found I was able to keep things reasonably frozen and off me and do enough DPS to kill fairly effectively even in MP10. You won't be permafreezing like a CM/WW build but it's enough for it to be viable.

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