Dark and Darker – Wizard FAQ (with Tips)

Frequently Asked Questions and Useful Tips

What Perks should I use?

Then there are 2 generically recommended Wiz perks at the moment, Sage and Quick Chant, as they both boost your Spell Casting Speed. These lose effectiveness the more knowledge you have, so feel free to drop at higher knowledge.

For the final perks, we can get more damage, healing reduction, or defenses:

• Arcane Mastery is solid if you have MM + Invis.
• Staff Mastery does very high melee damage w/ staff and adds an extra layer of +add scaling to melees.
• Spell Overload is still very good, especially if you end up using the same 3-5 spells anyways. 10-Spell has more versatility and is my preference.
• Mana Surge is a solid filler for the 10% MPB% boost
• Fire Mastery gives a solid boost to Zap damage, and healing reduction on it + fire spells. VERY good damage wise for non-ignite builds vs. most classes.
• Ice Shield is still our best defensive option vs. melees
• Ice Mastery is functionally an extra 15% slow on IB in solos.

Reactive Shield overwrites other shields leading to some anti-synergy. This shouldn’t matter too much, since if you’re taking damage the other shields should be gone UNLESS you’re taking mixed damage or swarm damage (arcane shield)

What Stats should I prioritize?

Knowledge for spell casting speed until comfort, usually at least 60-70%.

+Additional [True] Magic Damage is still out best 1:1 stat for damage. True damage is generally better unless you’re hitting headshots.

Will [or Magic Power] is currently where we get the 2nd most damage scaling, but it’s not as efficient as +additional for damage 1:1. On pieces that can’t roll +add, this is our only damage stat. Generally, 3 magic power ~= 1 Additional Damage.

HP and Move Speed (in all forms) are exceptional

What Spells should I use?

Magic Missile is still alright with gear – +7 damage (including weapon) makes it better than the 50% ABR version. Worse now vs. shields, but people still will try to trade into it and die for it.

Slow is surprisingly strong, and can replace Haste for kiting purposes. This will help a lot if melee players rushing you down is an issue.

Zap is hitscan, consistent damage. Very good for getting around shields / in cluttered fights.

Ice bolt is solid, with higher damage than zap, but less reliable. The 20% slow is also strong vs. melee matchups. Not good vs. shields. Ice Mastery functionally makes it a 35% slow in solos, but the root has some extra value in teams.

Fireball is still the highest damage spell we have access to if you can land a direct hit. But with everyone having shields, that shouldn’t happen. It’s still useful at longer ranges if you have high +add for just splash damage.

Lightning Strike is an inconsistent damage spell with a 20% slow that’s an alternative to Fireball. You can jump this spell and take 0 damage.

Explosion is basically zap, but delayed with a small AoE. It’s not great, but it’s one of our few options vs. shield users.

Chain Lightning has the highest damage potential in 3v3s, and has some use in solos. It’s a fun spell at the very worst. Invis is still a solid good engage or spacing tool.

What type of spell is X?

The spell icon/border color indicates what type of spell it is.

• Red = Fire, Light Blue = Water, Dark Blue = Lightning, Purple = Arcane, White = Light

How does spell casting speed work?

Spell Casting Speed is how much faster you cast a spell. If you have 100% spell casting speed, you cast a spell 100%, or 2x, faster, resulting in the total cast time being 50% of the base time.

Magic Missile interacts with spell speed in a unique case, as it also shortens the total time it takes to release all 10 missiles. ie., the more cast speed you have, the faster your MM shoots.

How do these stats work?

Will does a number of things, but primarily increases your Magic Power sub-stat at a 1:1 ratio, which in turn increases your Magic Power Bonus % stat.

This stat increases the damage of your spells by the % of the spell’s base damage + weapon damage. You get 3% damage per point until 25 Magic Power, then 2% until 40.

Knowledge increases your spell casting speed, spell capacity and spell regen rate. Spell Capacity determines which spells you can have memorized, and spell casting speed affects how fast your spells “charge”.

• +Additional Magical Damage adds flat damage to your spells. This damage does not scale with MPB%, and is affected by Magic Resistance, Projectile Resistance, and limb penalties/bonuses when applicable.
• +Additional True Magical Damage functions almost identically to Additional Magic Damage. The differences are that it ignores Magic Resistance, Projectile Resistance, limb penalties/bonuses, and Magic Resistance when applicable.

Some spells have unique “scalings” – Zap, Fireball and Ignite have additional damage from burns, which scale at 50%. And Fireball’s splash affects targets that are directly hit.

These videos are all still accurate in concept – the numbers/specific scalings are subject to change. See this videos on Damage Calculations and Hotfix 7 changes to scaling.

Damage Calculations:

Hotfix 7 Clarifications:

Is Fire Mastery worth using?

The Healing Reduction is very good!

The additional burn duration doesn’t add any extra damage, but rather spreads out the burns total damage over the extra 2 seconds resulting in lower DPS, or even lower total damage if you reapply the burn.

If a target has enough Will / Debuff Duration reduction – where they wouldn’t take damage from a 1s dot – this can add significant damage. The most notable case is zap, where it now adds a large chunk of damage to targets who have >16(?) Will. Healing reduction seems to be functioning as you’d expect.

Are there any other builds?

There are a couple, 10-Spell, Melee and Intense Focus.

10-Spell lets you have access to all of the tools of Wizard. In default/low gear though, you’ll likely only be able to run 7-9 spells.

Melee builds just use Ignite on a Magic Staff w/ Staff Mastery. It takes advantage of double scalings to apply 2x your +add damage, including the staffs innate magic damage. Doesn’t work well vs. people with a brain, but people will just hug your face and get 2-tapped.

Overload works with anything, but for 5 spell:

• Intense Focus makes your next spell cast ‘instant’, which can lead to high burst and increases your counter-engage potential.
• Arcane shield adds a lot of tankiness and is super solid required for melee builds.

I hope you found this useful!