The Diablo Grind

My greater rift progress got stuck in the mid 50s. Wizards are doing fine on the solo leaderboards, so I did some checking on what builds they were using. I was a little confused by the energy twister builds - I couldn't see how you could possibly cast enough energy twisters to make the build work, especially since they didn't even seem overly focused on generating arcane power. Sure, they have Reapers Wraps and Power Hungry, but I don't recall greater rifts throwing healing orbs at me every two seconds. And if you do the math on twisters, they don't really come out ahead of arcane orbs unless you can actually spam them.

I tried it out and it played as well as I thought, that is, very badly.

Bright Cape Gamer fills in the blank on that one, the energy twister build is more for multi-player than single player. But I found the Delsere's / Arcane Orb at tier 84 on the leaderboards, so what I'm doing essentially works. What, then, am I doing wrong?

There are probably a few things. I'm using a non-optimal weapon mod in my cube. I'm using Focus and Restraint when apparently Convention of Elements and the Traveller's Pledge set are the way to go. I'm probably playing wrong and shouldn't be fighting fewer than at least about 10 enemies at a time.

But what occurred to me, looking over my stuff, is that I don't have an ancient weapon. That's a really big deal that significantly lowers my damage. So what do I do about that?

Well, I can reroll my weapon for 5 of each act item and 50 forgotten souls. That is, with 50 of each and 500 souls I could, on average, produce an ancient weapon for myself.

In my youth, this probably would have seemed like nothing. It takes perhaps an hour to clear out the bounties in all five acts on Torment VII, so 50 of each act item is probably less than seven hours of grinding, along that way I'm going to make significant headway towards the 500 souls - 60 some from boxes alone. But grinding up souls doesn't take that long either: you can get two or three every five minutes doing rifts, so 30 or more an hour is probably reasonable. If I was playing all day every day an ancient weapon of my choice wouldn't seem so far off.

Playing only a couple of hours a day makes that route to ancients seem obscenely cumbersome.

Last season I found an ancient Chantodo's wand with a very high damage roll, +10% damage, a high intelligence roll and max cooldown reduction pretty early into it. Since Archon was the best build, that was quite a find. This season I feel left behind, but I guess the reality is that I'm just not putting in the time.