Diablo III- Skills Article CLI: The Wizard, Mastery Skills- Archon

Archon (25 Arcane Power, Cooldown 120 Seconds): You transform into the powerful floating Archon form for 15 seconds.  While in Archon form, your skill and rune selections are replaced with the powerful Archon skills, your Armor and Resistances increase by 40%, and every enemy you kill increases the duration of Archon form by 1 second.

The Archon is essentially the exact opposite of a panic button.  Where a panic button saves your life by granting you massively increased protection and sometimes a moderate boost to your damage, Archon form kills everything around you by giving you new abilities that deal massive damage and has a side effect of passably improving your defenses.  At higher difficulties, Archon is one of the best ways to handle champion and rare enemies, and while you can still die in Archon form, using it properly will let you kill everything around you before it has a chance.

Arcane Destruction (25 Arcane Power, Cooldown 120 Seconds): You explode with energy, dealing 450% weapon damage as Arcane damage to all enemies within 15 yards and transform into the powerful floating Archon form for 15 seconds.  While in Archon form, your skill and rune selections are replaced with the powerful Archon skills, your Armor and Resistances increase by 40%, and every enemy you kill increases the duration of Archon form by 1 second.

How would you like some damage with your damage?  Arcane Destruction is best used by close-range Wizards, who will naturally be near a lot of enemies to begin with.  450% weapon damage is pretty impressive, and makes an excellent opening strike for shifting into Archon form and then obliterating everything in reach.  Just keep in mind the long cooldown- the explosion won’t do you any good if you count on using it every battle and get yourself in neck-deep only to find you need 20 more seconds.

Teleport (25 Arcane Power, Cooldown 120 Seconds): You transform into the powerful floating Archon form for 15 seconds.  While in Archon form, your skill and rune selections are replaced with the powerful Archon skills (plus the Archon Teleport), your Armor and Resistances increase by 40%, and every enemy you kill increases the duration of Archon form by 1 second.

Adding teleportation to the Archon form can be useful- but teleporting generally cuts into your ‘killing everything’ time.  If you need the tactical advantage it’s good, but most of the time it’s an addition you don’t really care about.

Pure Power (25 Arcane Power, Cooldown 100 Seconds): You transform into the powerful floating Archon form for 15 seconds.  While in Archon form, your skill and rune selections are replaced with the powerful Archon skills, your Armor and Resistances increase by 40%, and every enemy you kill increases the duration of Archon form by 1 second.

Reducing the cooldown of Archon to 100 seconds is fairly nice, but it’s still almost 2 minutes, and that’s too long to make it a skill you can use in every battle.  If you’re going to have to wait anyway, why worry about it?  Most cooldown reduction runes are way stronger than 1/6, anyhow.  Still, you may want to try it.

Slow Time (25 Arcane Power, Cooldown 120 Seconds): You transform into the powerful floating Archon form for 15 seconds.  While in Archon form, your skill and rune selections are replaced with the powerful Archon skills (plus the Archon Slow time), your Armor and Resistances increase by 40%, and every enemy you kill increases the duration of Archon form by 1 second.

Having a Slow Time effect available to you as an Archon is frankly just hilarious.  It’s pretty much the difference between shooting fish in a barrel and shooting fish glued to the inside of a barrel.  Have fun with that, okay?  Yeah.

Improved Archon (25 Arcane Power, Cooldown 120 Seconds): You transform into the powerful floating Archon form for 15 seconds.  While in Archon form, your skill and rune selections are replaced with the powerful Archon skills, your Armor and Resistances increase by 40%, and every enemy you kill increases the duration of Archon form by 1 second.  Additionally, the damage of your Archon skills is increased by 25%.

I just want to be clear here, the Improved Archon does not increase the damage of your Archon skills by 25% of your weapon damage.  It increases them by 25% of what they otherwise would be.  This is clearly an impressive improvement- but just how impressive you really won’t grasp until you know the Archon skills.  Suffice to say, this probably even beats the Slow Time rune for making Archon even more awesome than it already was.  Now you’re shooting fish in a barrel with a minigun.