Tal Meteor Wizard BiS Gear, Gems, and Paragon Points (2024)

With the flexibility afforded by the seven available pieces of the Tal Rasha set and the Ring of Royal Grandeur, you will be able to take five Tal's set pieces,mix in an additional set into the build, and still fit extra legendaries. InGreater Rifts, this additional set will be Aughild's Authority, attaining itsbonuses by wearing Aughild's Power and Aughild's Search. Note thatthis is a craftable set at the Blacksmith in town, making perfecting its rollsa somewhat easier task. A suggested split between the sets is listed below,though you can vary the pieces according to your preference and best rolls, aslong as you maintain the required 5 Tal's — 2 Aughild's set piecescombination, along with RoRG in the Cube.

Rolls-wise this precise, nuke-oriented build will benefit greatly fromSkill Damage and Area Damage affixes, alongside the usual stacking ofCrit-related stats. High Crit Chance and Crit Damage are needed on the gloves,alongside Intelligence and Area Damage. Meteor % damage can roll onhelm and boots, so obtain it on both; the former will also include an AttackSpeed roll (innate stat on Mempo of Twilight). The pants, belt and chestshould be largely Toughness slots. Arcane damage, double Crit stats and anopen Socket are BiS on the amulet.

With your amulet slot occupied by Tal's, your best way to finish offjewelry is to split between offense and defense in the rings with thecombination of Convention of Elements and Halo of Karini. Convention of Elements boosts your elemental damage in cycles accordingto the elements available to your class, so you need to internalize itsrotation and be ready with your pulls for the Arcane cycle, when you shouldburst enemies down. Halo of Karini offers massive damage reduction thatis just about non-negotiable, and has the modest requirement of keeping your Storm Armor active and keeping distance from the enemy. Note that ifyou want to introduce more tankiness to the build, either due to playingHardcore or inexperience with the playstyle, you can drop CoE for the addedsafety of Unity, coupled with another on the follower plus animmortality relic for them (i.e. Enchanting Favor). This will cutincoming damage in half.

A trio of Meteor-specific items make up the remainder of your gear. Buffedin Patch 2.7.4, Mempo of Twilight now applies the Meteor Showerrune to all casted Meteors, and multiples their damage. Nilfur's Boast is a Meteor build mainstay, further multiplyingthe skill's damage, and empowering it against singular targets — amassive boon against Rift Guardians. Finally, the mandatory weapon for thebuild is The Grand Vizier — a two-handed legendary staff thatreduces the Arcane Power cost of Meteor in half, and, once again,greatly multiplies its damage. Note that unlike its fixed Resource CostReduction bonus, the damage multiplication is of variable strength — andtry to get as good of a roll as you can.

For Offense stats, try to obtain Meteor % bonus on the helm and boots(maximum of 30%), Arcane elemental damage on the amulet and wrists (maximum of40%), Crit Chance and Crit Damage within a 1:10 ratio (ideally over 45% and450%, respectively), and Area Damage of 150%+.

For Defense stats, aim for a life pool of 800k+; dropping as much as youcan for offense as you grow accustomed to the build. You will mostly sustainthrough your follower, so you will not be focusing on regenerative rolls ongear.

All augmentations on gear should be done with your main stat,Intelligence.

Note that the stat suggestions below portray an ideally rolled item withstats listed in relative order of importance. The first four of them are mainstats, and the latter two — secondary stats. If your item lacks and isunable to be rerolled into the primary stats outlined below, especially for astat higher on the list, strongly consider its replacement. PerfectingSecondary stats is mostly a case of hyper-optimization and is not a case fordiscarding an item, except where noted.

To help you with farming the gear you need for your builds, we have two veryuseful guides that you can access by clicking the links below: a Salvage Guide tohelp you quickly check whether or not you can safely salvage a piece of gear anda Legendary Farming Guide to help you efficiently farm legendaries and set items.

The former Season 28 theme, the Altar of Rites, has been revised andre-added to Diablo 3 as a permanent character progression mechanic. — Forvirtually all builds and players of all skill levels — from casual toadvanced — we recommend progressing through the Altar tree using the pathoutlined below. The suggested path is geared towards maximum quality of lifefirst, then amplifying damage, and then mopping up the tree with defensive andedge case utility nodes.

Note that while they require reaching them with a Seal, Legendary PotionPowers are not part of the Seal cost system; Potions unlock with a separateresource called Primordial Ashes, obtained from salvaging Legendary or Setitems of Primal (red bordered) quality. Upgrade them as soon as possible, andin the order shown below (courtesy of Caleko's Altar of Rites planner).

You can read more on the Altar of Rites, Seals and Legendary Potion Powersin our dedicated Altar of Rites Mechanics guide.

In the Core section, max out Movement Speed to the 25% cap. Normally thisis done by dumping the first 50 Core Paragon points into Movement Speed, butif your boots have an imperfect roll with Movement Speed as a stat that youcannot replace, adjust the necessary point investment accordingly by simplysubtracting your roll from the 25% max. Then, max out Arcane Power — thedamage of Star Pact scales off AP spent. After that dump as much as youcomfortably can into Intelligence, but feel free to invest into Vitality ifyou feel yourself lacking in toughness.

In the Offense section, max out Crit Damage, Crit Chance, CooldownReduction and Attack Speed in that order. In Defense, prioritize Armor, thenLife %, then All Resistance, and finish off with Life Regeneration. InUtility, build up Area Damage and Resource Cost Reduction first, then finishoff with Life on Hit and Globe Radius.

Bane of the Trapped is the staple gem of the build; a potent source ofadditional damage, as it is its own multiplier in your total damagecalculation. The gem procs itself with its level 25 property, as well asvarious other sources of crowd control in your and your follower's builds.

Esoteric Alteration brings a massive defensive bulwark to the build,reducing non-Physical damage by an amount scaling with the gem's level. Themost threatening attacks in Greater Rifts are the elemental affixes of thevarious Elite enemies you encounter, so the reduction of non-Physical damageis of highest importance. This gem further amplifies your elementalresistances with its level 25 property, which triggers when you get damagedbelow 50% of your health pool — a frequent enough scenario in highGreater Rift progression.

Introduced in Season 4, Bane of the Stricken occupies the third andfinal jewelry socket. Building up your damage multiplicatively in prolongedfights and with a level 25 bonus specifically targeting Rift Guardians, thisgem is designed to assist AoE heavy builds in their struggle against singletarget, high HP enemies during Greater Rift progression attempts.

When it comes to gear gems, you will start out progression by slotting thehighest available level of Topazes in the chest and pants sockets. Ideally,these will all be Flawless Royal Topaz as soon as possible. As you growin Paragon (bulking up Intelligence in the Core section) and aim for highertier and more dangerous GRs, you will transition those gems into the defensive Flawless Royal Ruby (Intelligence-based classes such as the Wizard arenaturally high in Resistances, so their protection scales better withimproving Armor instead). There is no specific breakpoint where you do that;the rule of thumb is to make the change as soon as you feel the lack oftoughness impede your progress. Since this is a Resource-intensive build, werecommend a Flawless Royal Topaz in the helm. In your weapon, use Flawless Royal Emerald for the Crit Damage boost.

For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.

Tucked away in the Cube, The Smoldering Core provides essentialpowers for Meteor-based builds. Its luring effect does pretty muchwhat it says on the tin — enemies are drawn (Taunted) to the impactareas of your Meteor casts. The stacking damage debuff ("consecutivehits against an enemy increase in damage") has a 5-second duration, refreshedon re-application. It produces a separate damage multiplier in your totaldamage calculation, and builds up to 500% extra damage on top. These effectscombined make this item an essential legendary effect for the build.

To counteract your resource pool depletion, you will be using The Shame of Delsere in the Cube, which augments your Signature Spellswith a massive Arcane Power restoration angle.

For the jewelry Cube slot, you will need to use the Ring of Royal Grandeur in order to tie the Tal Rasha and Aughild setstogether. This cache legendary ring from Act I bounties reduces the number ofworn items required for set bonus completion by one, allowing for the setamalgamation described above.

The Kanai's Cube can be used for much more than simply extracting Legendary powers from items. Pleaserefer to our Kanai's Cube guide for more information.

The seasonal theme for Season 31 will be completely flexible slots forKanai's Cube, which means you can use anypiece of gear in any slot of the Cube.

This is one of the builds where we don't recommend making any changes, sincethe options presented in the default build already make up the strongestKanai's Cube composition possible for the setup.

For Greater Rift progression with this build, we recommend theTemplar for his essential heal and cheat death abilities. TheTemplar is a preferable choice due to the lacking sustain in this build, aswell as the overall lackluster cheat death passive that Wizards have.

For more information regarding followers, we advise you to read our FollowerGuide, which contains detailed advice for choosing the skills and the gear ofyour follower.

The preferred potions for this build are Bottomless Potion of Kulle-Aid(allowing you to break down Waller affixes that impede Frozen Orb DPS), Bottomless Potion of the Unfettered (giving you a brief window of CCimmunity to counter your lack of CC-breaking or immunity skills), or Bottomless Potion of the Tower (whose Armor-increasing propertiescomplement the naturally high All Resistances stat of Wizards). Pick whicheveryou feel helps you out the most.