Diablo – Do mirror images benefit from the increased damage of Slow Time: Time Warp

It really depends on what your doing, and having the right weapon for the right job.

Hard hitting, slow weapons are applicable for spells which are not dependent on attack speed. This is a good amount of the Wizard's abilities. Such popular abilities include (but not limited to)

• Arcane Orb
• Hydra
• Blizzard
• Meteor
• Wave of Force

These abilities benefit from harder hitting weapons with the only downside being a slow unfront cast speed. The cast speed just means how fast you can start running (or casting) again after firing the spell. In Inferno difficulties this is actually quite important if you plan on kiting.

Quick weapons are applicable for spells which you cast a lot of in a short amount of time, and benefit from getting quantity over quality. The popular abilities include (but not limited to)

• All signature abilities
• Disintegrate

Signature abilities are great for getting your arcane power back up in order to cast the hard hitters again. As mentioned previously, the faster casting speed is also vital in being able to kite, even with the arcane guzzling abilities.

Basically, pick the right tool for the right job (or what goes with the build you want).

(To directly answer your question, all spells do their damage based on your weapon damage (plus modifiers), not the weapon's listed DPS).

Here are some general things I've observed from playing with a friend who runs both a Wizard and Witch Doctor (both glass cannon builds).

1. Wizard damage sources relies more on critical damage rather than straight up dps, so favors not only int but also crit.
2. Witch doctors relies on dps and mob control, and thus does not care as much about crit.

Since int + crit gear is a lot more expensive than int gear, and since your budget is only 1.5m, I'd highly recommend going the WD route.

Just from a few searches in the AH, I can piece together a fairly decent WD that can tackle up to a2 inferno(~40k dps and 25k health) just by going for the int + vit gears totaling roughly 1.5m. If you want to survive beyond act 2, you'll have to spend 1-2 mill (minimum) per piece of gear and go for the really good stuff with res all along with int/vit.