Diablo – the trigger mechanic for the wizard passive critical mass

diablo-3

This question is no longer relevant as the skill has been removed from the game as of Patch 2.0.1

Critical Mass is a wizard passive:
Critical Hits have a chance to reduce the cooldown of your spells by 1 second.

Do you know what is meant by "chance" ? It is probably something like an increasing chance over time that decrease every time it triggers, because if it was a flat % chance it would be in the description.

Most wizards cooldowns are about 15 seconds. When compared to evocation (reduces all cooldowns by 15%), critical mass needs to trigger at least 3 times every 15 seconds to be better than evocation. In my current setup, this is never the case. I would say that I deal about 10 critical hits in a normal 15 seconds fight. It is most of the time 1, sometimes 2. So I would guess that the base probability is something like 10%. My critical chance when doing this was 7%, so I think you have to increase it by a lot in order for critical mass to be effective.

Update: Critical mass recently got patched:

Fixed an issue with certain powers that had a higher than intended
chance to trigger Critical Mass

It is still not clear how it works. Apparently it depends in what skill you are using. The only way to be sure is actually testing in the game what the skill does; and I find it very frustrating. I want to be able to design a build without having to test myself every spell independently, or searching though the web if someone did it.

Update (1.0.3): With the attack speed nerf, critical mass got un-nerfed. There is a build called windup based on the fact that energy twister with wicked wind makes critical mass trigger very often.

Update (1.0.4): Now the skill energy twister – wicked wind used in the windup build has his modifier reduced by half, so the build is still good, but not as good as it used to be.

Best Answer

For the Critical Mass passive, what is meant by the "chance" is that it is determined by the proc coefficient of the spell you cast. Single target spells have 100% "chance" to reduce the cooldown by 1 second while AOE spells have differing sets of proc coefficents by spell AND rune. There's a few sites that break down proc coefficents of various spells which applies to crit chance as well as return on LOH. Here, and here. Luckily people with more patience than me seem to have most spells crit proc chance figured out.

Some useful proc chances for popular wizard spells:

Hydra: 0%, Hydras never proc
Magic Missile / Seeker: 100%
Shock Pulse / Piercing Orb: 25% per target hit
Blizzard / Snowbound: 2% per tick per target hit
Energy Twister / Wicked Wind: 10% per tick per target 
Explosive Blast / Chain Reaction: 11% per target hit per explosive (of 3)

I've recently been trying the Windup Wizard/CM build which still seems pretty effective, and a bit silly (in fact it was the easiest way for me to beat inferno Ghom). From personal experience I've found that on my wizard, when I run over 40% crit chance while using a build like windup wizard, everything is off cooldown pretty much all the time.

Related Topic