Season’s Journey

A short progress report on my journey through Diablo III’s fourth season.

My hardcore wizard is climbing the ranks, though not nearly as fast as some other bloggers. Eri is already working on paragon levels, and others on my Battle.net friends lists have been playing in the new torment levels. I saw a post on Anook where a guy just earned his 500th paragon level already, and said he “felt casual” because he knew people with 8-900. That’s just insane, though I suppose if I had some of that laser focus to just play one game at a time, I’d probably be quite a bit further along.

Either way, I ended up hitting level 39 last night, and at this point my melee “battlemage” build has been working really well. If you’re curious as to what constitutes my build, here’s a quick run down:

Spectral Blade with the Siphoning Blade rune: The bread and butter basic attack, it does frontal aoe damage and the rune gives me more arcane power per hit.
Arcane Orb with the Arcane Orbit rune: This spell is usually ranged where you sling the orb into groups of enemies for aoe damage. With the orbit, 4 orbs circle your wizard.
Frost Nova with the Cold Snap rune: An aoe panic ability, the freeze on this can slow down fights and allow you to reposition. Cold snap lengthens the freeze and lowers cooldown.
Wave of Force with the Arcane Attunement rune: Wave of Force is a larger diameter aoe that does some damage. I liked the pushback rune, but because both my mouse skills are arcane based, the attunement’s damage boost is preferable.
Storm Armor with the Thunder Storm rune: Storm armor is just nice for periodic damage to random enemies nearby. It’s like Blitzcrank’s Ult passive. The rune increases that damage.
Explosive Blast with the Flash rune: This is another short range aoe, but it goes off after a delay and has a longer cooldown. Flash reduces this cooldown, and the damage is changed to lightning. I know later you can make the blast happen immediately and I’ll most likely change to that.

Passives are Evocation for lower cooldowns overall, Astral Presence for extra arcane power and regen, and Blur for damage reduction. I’m trying to focus on cooldown reduction and health on hit along with resists for sustain. Some of these might change along the way as well, but this is how it stands for now.

I’ve been paying attention to the season journey page, and though it’s the same sort of things I would be doing in the game anyway, but I like the effect of having a checklist and a reward at the end. I finished the first chapter just the other night, though as it was I had already finished quite a few of the objectives in chapter two as well. Again, this is basically just the same stuff you’d be doing anyway, but the visual representation and having a checklist is a nice feature that was added in. I haven’t gotten Kanai’s cube on my seasonal character yet, but as I killed off mine and Eri’s first characters this season by going in there too soon, I’ve just been waiting for a bit. Not only that, the things I’d like to be ripping passives from probably won’t come til the tail end of the game anyway.

At the time that I took this screen shot I still needed to complete a couple of tasks in chapter 2, but I have since leveled the mystic to 10, so the only thing left is to level to 60. Unfortunately the following chapters are “locked” (you can check off items but unless you know what they are you can’t aim for them) until you finish the chapter before. So we’ll see what comes next, but 60 shouldn’t take to long to get to. More to come as I get there!

Today’s run is nothing spectacular. I made the run with plant, got shitty drops all around, and died on world 3. Hooray.