The third and final skill tree of the Wizard is completed from Flux's Full Wizard Skill Tree guide and added to the Diablo Wiki.

The Storm Skill Tree is the tree with the most spells from the Sorceress and crowd control capabilites, with many skills having the possibility of freezing the target, or stunning it.


Storm skills

Spells that bring in the cold air from the stratosphere, or brings forth lightning bolts flung at enemies.


Tier I

• Charged Bolt - Launch a volley of 3 electric bolts that deal X-Y lightning damage each.
• Ice Armor - A field of ice slows movement and attack speed of enemies that attack you at close range, and causes X cold damage.

Tier II

• Frost Nova - An explosion of ice pelts nearby enemies for X-Y cold damage. Has an additional Z% chance of a critical hit.
• Electrocute - Lightning arcs from the Wizard’s fingertips towards an enemy, electrocuting it for X-Y lightning damage.

Tier III

• Empowered Armor - Increases your armor by X%.
• Energy Twister - Summon an Energy Twister that deals 10 damage per second to everything in its path.

Tier IV

• Bonechilling Cold - Frozen targets take X% additional damage from all attacks.
• Ray of Frost - Project a beam of cold energy that deals X cold damage per second.

Tier V

• Blizzard - Call down shards of ice to pelt an area dealing X-Y cold damage per second for 3 seconds.
• Storm Armor - Surround yourself in electrical energy. Electric bolts are automatically fired at attackers for X to Y damage. Armor spells affect you and all nearby allies and you can only be affected by one armor spell at a time.

Tier VI

• Storm Power - Increase damage of all lightning and ice spells.

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We have continued to add the Full Wizard Skill Trees Flux was so kind to summarize for us after BlizzCon 2009 into the Diablo Wiki. The Conjuring skills were finished on Wednesday, and now we're done adding all the Arcane ones.

These are some of the coolest skills in the game, including Slow Time and Disintegrate. Here are the ten Arcane skills:


Arcane skills
Spells that warp time, and brings out ancient arcane energy goes into this tree.

Tier I

• Magic Missile - Fire X missile(s) of energy at your enemies causing Y-Z arcane damage to them.
• Expanded Mind - Expands the Wizard's knowledge increasing the Wizard's mana by X%.

Tier II

• Wave of Force - Project a wave of force outwards, repelling enemies and projectiles and dealing X-Y damage.

Tier III

• Arcane Orb - An orb of pure energy deals X-Y on contact and an additional Z-Q arcane damage to all enemies in the blast area.
• Energy Shield - A protective barrier absorbs incoming damage using mana. Every point of damage costs 2 mana. Damage absorbed: 75. Duration: 120 seconds.

Tier IV

• Disintegrate - Emanate a beam of pure energy dealing X arcane damage per second. Damage is modified to 80% each time the beam passes through a target.
• Slow Time - Warp space and time, slowing nearby monsters and projectiles. Cooldown: 20 seconds. Enemy cooldown increase: 1 seconds.

Tier V

• Arcane Torrent - Meteorites pelt the targeted region dealing X to Y damage per second.
• Arcane Weakness - Enemies damaged by your arcane spells are affected with Arcane Weakness, increasing damage taken by 20% for 5 seconds.

Tier VI

• Teleport Teleport to the selected location up to 100 feet away. Teleport can only be used every 9 seconds.

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A lot of work went in to Flux's guides of skills, like the Full Wizard Skill Trees, and they have been an invaluable source for the Diablo Wiki entries of all the new Skills. Muldric has also been a great help in visualizing the skill trees for all of us, and now it's time to add the "lost" Wizard skill trees to the rest.

First out is the Conjuring Skill Tree's 9 skills:


Tier I

• Spectral Blade - Summons a spectral blade that strikes each enemy in front of the Wizard 3 times causing physical damage with each hit.

Tier II

• Mirror Image - Creates an illusionary duplicate of yourself that lasts for 8 seconds that has 20-100% of your health.
• Stability Control - Health Globes also restore some mana when picked up.

Tier III

• Explosive Blast - A blast of energy explodes at the target causing arcane damage in a small radius.
• Stone Skin - Shield yourself with rock and stone, absorbing damage during an 8 second period.

Tier IV

• Hydra - Creates a hydra that attacks your enemies with bolts of fire. Hydra deals 6-10 damage per attack.
• Intensify - When you pick up a health globe, your critical hit chance increases for 7 seconds.

Tier V

• Mighty Impact - Increases critical hit damage by 10%.
• Magic Weapon - Imbue your weapon with magical energy granting it increased damage. From 25-35 damage and up, for 2 minutes.

Also, don't forget to check out the latest wiki updates on the top of the Diablo 3 news page, as this is just one of many updates in the last few weeks. Among the updates you might want to check out the Wizard skill archive, that we started with the creation of new ones and the archiving of the outdated articles.

Thanks Holyknight3000, Midoxp, DxAxxxTyriel, Veskin7 Bukito, Vipermagi, TheWanderer, Flux, Fronkenstein, Fighterbitsj, Dragonhelmuk, Krunkest404 and Bran Maniac for the last 2000 edits in the last 2 weeks!

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Our Tuesday morning interview with Diablo III Game Designer Jay Wilson went off smoothly (thanks to all who submitted questions), and despite scheduling issues resulting in our interview lasting a bit less than the anticipated 30 minutes, we were able to get off a lot of questions. Fifty-six, by my count, and having just finished transcribing them all, I should know. We’re not going to be posting them all at once just yet, and will instead put up a thematically-related chunk each day, before posting the full transcript next week. All the better for you guys to sink your teeth into the new info. And yes, there’s a lot of new info, and some very debate-worthy stuff. I’m personally itching to rip into Blizzard’s plans regarding one aspect of the game controls, but that will have to wait until another day.

For today, we’re starting off with some additional info on something we just found out about at BlizzCon, and that we’ve heard almost no details about yet. The non-mana resource system that the Wizard and Monk will be using. If you missed the Blizzcon headlines, let me explain. Only the Witch Doctor will have “mana,” in Diablo 3. The Barbarian has Fury, which is fairly well understood, but we don’t yet know anything about what the Wizard and Monk (or the secret 5th character) will use. Jay wasn’t about to spill all the beans, but he was quite forthcoming about how the various mana-like resource systems are designed to work, and what sort of play style they are meant to encourage. Here’s the quote; click through to see the equally-informative follow up.

Diii.net: Everyone seems pretty happy with the function and form of the Barbarian’s Fury resource, but nothing has been revealed about the non-mana resources that the Wizard and Monk will use. Can you give us some insight into what kind of play style their resources are meant to encourage?

Jay Wilson: Well for the Wizard we want to enforce the fact that she’s a glass cannon. I don’t think it’s fun to ever run out of mana. I’m not really interested in an extended resource for her. For the WD we’re okay with mana, since he’s got some pretty good skills to recover mana that also double as attacks. And he’s not defenseless when he’s out of mana. He’s got pets and ways to attack with them that aren’t mana intensive. For him that makes mana fairly interesting.

For the wizard, when she’s out of mana she just dies. And that’s not fun.  So if anything, we want to encourage how she plays. So she’s the kind of character that blasts first and asks questions later.  Very vulnerable. So we want to implement a system that makes her more blasty, but even more vulnerable. We want to make that a choice for the player. “Do I want to make myself more vulnerable in exchange for being more blasty.” And that’s a cool gameplay pull there.

For the Monk um… I’m not ready to talk about him yet since he’s just too early. We still haven’t decided exactly what we want to do with him. We’re still playing around with his resource system.

Diii.net: Do you envision the health globes will boost those other resources in the way that the Wizard and Witch Doctor were gaining mana from them at Blizzcon?

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It seems to me from what Bashiok posted, that It would be best not to post threads debating class skill stats.  It is pointless to do so when the developers haven’t yet started to balance each class.  It can’t be done without the last class, which hasn’t been announced yet.  Once that’s done, and beta has started, they can tweak around the skill tree and some abilities/spells.  What we see in its current form is a placeholder, so to speak.

Regardless, this response adds some info that wasn’t known before.  Though the Wizard’s teleport is set in the present with a 9 sec cooldown, that’s a placeholder and that can be reduced with runes and skill points.  I think everyone will agree that teleport isn’t much of a problem at low level.  As Bashiok says, the cooldown can be lowered through the skill tree.  On another topic, all classes will have their own way to leap like the Barbarian, though in different ways. The Barbarian can leap, the Wizard can teleport.  It remains to be seen what the analog to other classes will be. Speculating, surely the Witch Doctor has a Wall of Zombies ... I guess the Witch Doctor might summon a bridge of bones or catapult himself across a bridge by casting Wall of Zombies below his feet? Why not? What do you think? What about the Monk? Join the discussion.

Blizzard’s lengthy post on this after the break.

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Past installments of Stillman’s Slab have been fairly cartoonish (often visually) in their arguments, but this time he’s mixing things up. He’s making a seemingly crazy argument, but doing so in serious, and rather convincing terms. Believe it or not, a careful analysis of the Wizard’s spells indicates that the character is much more inspired by Science Fiction than by Fantasy. Spell names, spell functions, the character’s bio… all smack of, or have a direct lineage to SciFi terms, concepts, and archetypes. (Perhaps much to the D3 Team’s surprise.)

Here’s a quote to give you the flavor of things. Click through to read the entire column.

Of course, that is what all this is– crazy theory. But if you look at all of the Wizard’s spell names, they have a steady science theme you simply cannot ignore. The skills Stability Control and Explosive Blast sound very space age to me. They make me think of a spacecrafts stability or controls…after an explosive blast. Meteors are directly from outer space, or if they go with Torrents, that kind of sounds like turrets. The meteors even look like they are being fired from turrets. And Slow Time is about as science fiction as it gets. The skill Wave of Force not only looks like a force field from science fiction movies, but the terms “wave” and “force” are terms encountered endlessly in any scientific field. The Conjuring Skill Tree seems to conjure mostly high energy armors and buffs like a spacecraft’s defenses rather than old school things you would expect from a conjuring Wizard. The only exception I noticed is Hydra, but we have yet to see what it looks like. Metal hydras would be my guess! And masterful understanding of weather is something we have in modern times (but not in the Dark Ages), so it is no surprise that our Wizard has a whole Storm Skill Tree. Meanwhile, Fireball (which makes us think of catapulted fireballs of ancient times), Inferno and any old fashioned spell designs from high fantasy settings are a thing of the past. 

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Here they are. Every Wizard skill in the game, sorted by skill tree. There are 30 of them, and each skill has its full hover text, with info about function, damage type, cool down time, and mana cost. We’ve also added some commentary to all of the skills, many of which we were able to test out in the Blizzcon demo.

While the Wizard had the fewest skills of any character (save the Monk) in the Blizzcon demo, it didn’t seem that way, since almost all the Wizard skills were active, and so many were usable in the game. If I’d had time to play any of the characters a second time, I would definitely have chosen the Wizard, who had more low level active skills than the WD and Barb added together. I put in about an hour on the character, and put points into every skill I could, but there were so many, with such variety in their function and use, that I hardly scratched the surface. And there were numerous skills I didn’t get to try at all. I dearly wanted to play longer, to try and get my Wizard to level 15 so I could have used one of the never-before-seen Tier IV skills).

Click through to see more info about how spell damage is calculated in D3 (much like weapon damage; it’s radically different than spells were D2), learn a bit more about the structure of D3 skill trees, and to read about every Wizard skill in the game, as of Blizzcon 2009.

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We never stopped thinking about those wonderful Diablo skills during the downtime of DiabloWiki, and we are continuing with adding more details to them now that the wiki is back up again! Like the Arcane skills already added, the Conjuring skills are now getting their time in the limelight! Just remember that while some skills are spells, all spells are skills. Yes, a little complex, but it makes sense if you think about it.

This is probably the only skill tree with almost no major reference to Dungeons & Dragons pen and paper RPG spells, somethign that is very prominent in the Arcane tree for instance.

First of the Conjuring skills are the nine skills from the first two tiers of skills:

• Spectral Blade - The spell which already is an ultra-classic for the Wizard. Snikt-snikt and monsters die galore.
• Spell Speed - Spell Speed is a Tier 1 passive skill, making Magic Missiles travel faster.
• Damage Resistance - Damage Resistance is a Tier 1 passive skill, increasing armor value and resistances.
• Weapon Mastery - Weapon Mastery is a Tier 1 passive skill, flat increase of damage dealt with regular weapons. Quite a strange skill. Perhaps we'll see a lot more melee Wizards than we saw hand to hand Sorcerers in Diablo II...

The casting animation of Mirror Image.

• Stone Skin - This is one of the few active skills there are no screenshots, or gameplay video footage of. Hopefully remedied at BlizzCon 2009! As the name say: It give you stone skin, absorbing damage.
• Mirror Image - Quite cool, and still a little bit of a mystery. Mirror image creates 5 copies of the Wizard as decoys, but they have health, and also seem to fight!
• Conjured Armor - Conjured Armor is a Tier 2 passive skill, increasing blocking.
• Conjured Health - Conjured Health is a Tier 2 passive skill, increasing health of the Wizard as well as conjured images (like Mirror Image).
• Duplicate Conjuring - Duplicate Conjuring is a Tier 2 passive skill, increases the number of images summoned with Mirror Image and Hydra.

P.S.
If you have time to help out in the wiki, add more pictures to these spell articles from the Diablo 3 gallery! We even have a nice help page for how to add all sorts of pictures. Leave a comment here, or e-mail if you need any help at all.

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The skill revamp I mentioned a week ago continues, and we now present another polished set of skills. It's the high level Arcane skills of the Wizard, bringing more nasty spells to all us Wizard fans. These are some of the coolest spells in the new game, or cool remakes of old ones:

• Arcane Orb - First major damage spell of the Wizard. It's like a Fireball, but Arcane, and looks like a Frozen Orb.
• Slow Time - Probably one of the coolest spelsl in Diablo III, allowing the Wizard a small area of relative safety as well as an option to push back spells using the Wave of Force mentioned last week.
• Arcane Distortion - Arcane Distortion is a Tier 3 Passive skill, slowing enemies hit by Arcane spells.
• Mana Recovery - Mana Recovery is a Tier 3 Passive skill, making enemies dropping Mana Globes.
• Improved Magic Missile - Improved Magic Missile is a Tier 3 Passive skill, improving the spell Magic Missile with more missiles and damage.



• Temporal Armor - You might think it's Mana Shield, but it's not! Instead the shield will block ALL damage from one attack every 6 seconds. Very interesting skill!
• Teleport - The favourite from D1 and D2 is back. A little slower, but can now be used offensively with a Striking Rune.
• Greater Mana - Greater Mana is a Tier 4 Passive skill, the one you need to put points in to get more Mana, now when Willpower insrease regeneration rather than the pool itself.
• Mana Burst - Mana Burst is a Tier 4 Passive skill, allowing the Wizard to deal extra damage if they cast spells with full mana.
• Runic Might - Runic Might is a Tier 4 Passive skill, increasing skill rune power for all spells.

P.S.
If you have time to help out in the wiki, add more pictures to these spell articles from the Diablo 3 gallery! We even have a nice help page for how to add all sorts of pictures. Leave a comment here, or e-mail if you need any help at all.

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We have started our revamp of arguable the most interesting part of Diablo III: The Skills! DiabloWiki really has all interesting information available about the Spells of D3, but we are now improving this further by adding it all together in individual articles for each spell. More details, and easier to overview. Everything you could want. Just remember that while some skills are spells, all spells are skills!

First out is the Wizard, and her first two Tiers of spells from the Arcane Skill Tree:

• Magic Missile - First in the line of spells clearly inspired by D&D (which we KNOW they are...). Blizzard is going back to their roots, but giving it a new twist. This is the only Active spell in the first tier of the Arcane skill tree. Below you have three Passive skills to boost spell power!
• Arcane Power - Arcane Power is a Tier 1 passive skill, increasing all arcane damage by a percentage per skill rank.
• Efficient Magics - Efficient Magics is a Tier 1 passive skill, decreasing skill mana cost.
• Penetrating Spells - Penetrating Spells is a Tier 1 passive skill from the Wizard's Arcane skill tree, lowering opponent resistances.

• Disintegrate - Second in line of D&D spells. This is a powerful Tier 2 "laser-like" spell that instantly damages every enemy in a line. The first takes the most damage, and subsequent enemies take less after that.
• Wave of Force - Almost more of a defensive spell than a damage spell, Tier 2 WoF will push back monsters, objects and projectiles from the Wizard. Seen used with Slow Time to stop enemy projectiles and throw them back at the shooter.
• Arcane Armor - Arcane Armor is a Tier 2 passive skill, increasing armor while armor spells are active.
• Arcane Weakness - Arcane Weakness is a Tier 2 passive skill, adding a debuff to enemies hit with Arcane spells.
• Arcane Speed - Arcane Speed is a Tier 2 passive skill, shortening the cooldown on arcane spells.

P.S.
If you have time to help out in the wiki, add more pictures to these spell articles from the Diablo 3 gallery! We even have a nice help page for how to add all sorts of pictures. Leave a comment here, or e-mail if you need any help at all.

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