Items
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Head
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Shoulders
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Amulet
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Torso
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Wrists
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Hands
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Waist
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Legs
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Feet
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Rings
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Weapon
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Offhand
Kanai's Cube
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The Furnace
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Quetzalcoatl
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Ring of Emptiness
Skills
Locust Swarm: Open with this to aggro a bunch of mobs.
Haunt: Apply this to as many mobs as possible. This is your main source of Damage. Spam this on the Rift Guardian.
Piranhas: Use this just before Soul Harvest to group up the mobs.
Soul Harvest: Cast this on a group of mobs to consume the DoT and deal massive damage.
Spirit Walk: Breaks any form of Disable (Jailer, Frozen, Slowed) and makes you immune to damage. Use this to get in and/or out without taking damage.
Horrify: Use this on groups of enemies to disable them for a short duration. Helps to escape without taking damage. Also provides a large toughness boost with the bonus armor.
Passives
Creeping Death: will enhance our DoTs by making them last a very long time. (3600 seconds)
Swampland Attunement: grants solid damage reduction that scales off density.
Confidence Ritual: is taken for the pure boost in damage, you'll be up close when you deal damage anyway.
Grave Injustice: gives cooldown reduction, health and mana on kill... it's a really good passive.
If using Hellfire: Spirit Vessel
Items
Raiment of the Jade Harvester: This is the set that this build is focused on. We need every piece of the set except for the Helm.
Quetzacoatl: The legendary effect of this helm will effectively cause our DoTs to deal double damage.
Sacred Harvester: Increases our Soul harvest stacks to 10 which gives us more damage and survivability.
Lakumba's Ornament: The damage reduction is huge and will become mandatory in higher level rifts.
Ring of Emptiness: Everything should be affected by both your Locust Swam and your Haunt so this is a huge damage boost with 100% up-time.
Gems
Bane of the Trapped - Great damage focused gem. You have multiple control-impairing effects to make full use of this gem (Haunt, Piranhas, Horrify) and since you'll be up close anyway it'll proc itself. Use it!
Bane of the Stricken - This build slows down a bit when facing the Rift Guardian. This gem will speed up the fight and help you close it out.
Esoteric Alteration - Useful damage mitigation. You'll need it for higher level rifts.
Paragon Priorities
Core
Movement Speed
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Primary Stat
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Vitality
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Maximum Resource
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Offense
Cooldown Reduction
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Critical Hit Damage
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Critical Hit Chance
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Attack Speed
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Defense
Armor
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Resist All
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Life
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Life Regeneration
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Utility
Resource Cost Reduction
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Life on Hit
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Area Damage
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Gold Find
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Core
Max out movement speed until you reach the cap and then put the rest into Int. If you're having trouble surviving you can try out Vit but as they say "The best defense is a good offense". You should have at least 400,000 Life so keep that in mind.
Offense
Max Cooldown Reduction to get more frequent Soul Harvests. Critical Hit Damage and Critical Hit Chance can be taken in whichever order you need. Attack speed is not really required, so pick it up after.
Defense
Witch Doctors have a high amount of Resist All from their high Intelligence. You will have a lack of Armor though so it will give you a high boost to your Toughness. Resist All is still useful so that is the next priority. Life is less desired because it requires a larger amount of Healing to fill back up. Life Regen is fine if you prefer.
Utility
This is really up to you, I prefer resource Cost Reduction because of how much Locust Swarm costs and allows me to be a bit more reckless with mana. Life on Hit and Area Damage are both good. Take Gold Find if you're not doing Greater Rifts.
Build Guide
Overview
To play this build you will want to aggro a bunch of enemies with Locust Swarm and Haunt, we can then cast Piranhado to group them all up and then cast Soul Harvest to deal massive damage. Spirit Walk can be used to get in and out of dangerous areas in order to cast Soul Harvest. Horrify should be cast whenever possible for the boost in survivability it gives.
Wormwood vs Furnace (in the Cube)
Use the Wormwood if you are lazy (like me) and use the Furnace if you are pushing higher Grifts.
Why don't you use The Compass Rose & The Traveler's Pledge
This build doesn't really utilize the damage portion of this set. You never really stop moving long enough for it to work. While the damage mitigation is good, it's not essential. A well rolled Hellfire amulet and a Unity is a great alternative for running Solo and even a Poison Stone of Jordan is viable. Try different things to see what gives the best bonus.
How does Quetzalcoatl work?
Quetzalcoatl: Locust Swarm and Haunt now deal their damage in half of the normal duration.
Say your Haunt deals 1000 damage over 10 seconds. What Quetzalcoatl will do is make your Haunt deal 1000 damage over 5 seconds.
Damage done in 10 seconds without Quetzalcoatl = 1000. Damage Per Second = 1000/10 = 100
Damage done in 5 seconds with Quetzalcoatl = 1000. Damage Per Second = 1000/5 = 200
With Creeping Death, Haunt will last 3600 seconds (or 60 minutes). Add Quetzalcoatl and it'll make Haunt deal the same damage except over 1800 seconds (or 30 minutes). Add the Jade 6pc to deal 150 seconds worth of Haunt damage instantly and we get the following:
Without Quetz: 100 DPS x 150 seconds = 15000
With Quetz: 200 DPS x 150 seconds = 30000
Disclaimer: All builds are Work in Progress. Please comment with suggestions for improvement.
Looking for more builds?
Immortal Kings Call
The Legacy of Raekor
Might of the Earth
Wrath of the Wastes
Armor of Akkhan
Thorns of the Invoker
Roland's Legacy
Seeker of the Light
Natalya's Vengeance
Embodiment of the Marauder
The Shadow's Mantle
Unhallowed Essence
Monkey King's Garb
Inna's Mantra
Raiment of a Thousand Storms
Uliana's Stratagem
Zunimassa's Haunt
Raiment of the Jade Harvester
Helltooth Harness
Spirit of Arachyr
Tal Rasha's Elements
Firebird's Finery
Vyr's Amazing Arcana
Delsere's Magnum Opus
You want to keep casting haunt on the Rift Guardian because of the 2pc bonus which causes you to deal 60 seconds worth of Haunt Damage to enemies already affected by Haunt. Doing this will get your Stricken stacks up also. DoT ticks won't provide ticks as far as I am aware but it doesn't matter.
Thanks for the explanation. I will use Bane of the Powerful for normal rifts then
Also I found out that Efficacious Toxin's DoT actually could be consumed by Harvester's 6pc passive, so will this make Toxin better than Stricken?
What is important though is that having 10 stacks will give you 30% more intelligence which is a pretty significant boost to damage and toughness.
I haven't gotten around to playing my Witch Doctor this season so I can't CONFIRM that hitting an enemy with 3 haunts will work. I'm fairly certain that if you only have 1 available target when you cast Haunt it'll only send out 1 Haunt. But I'm yet to test it out this season.
could you get rid of locus swarm if you have the wormwood cube power?
Why reroll anything on the wormwood? We're cubing it.
Thank you. :-)
This is true for all skills that are auto cast from an item (eg, Belt of the Trove). But you don't really need any of the runes for this skill. Especially if you have the Vile Hive because it will give it the Pestilence Rune.
You will be able to get higher with this build, but it'll start peaking at about 70+. I would recommend you use this build until you have enough ancient gear to make a Legacy of Nightmares build.
In terms of damage, the weapon is going to make the biggest difference. Having high crit chance and crit damage will also increase the damage of your harvests. Try to clump up big groups to make the most out of the area damage. For damage reduction you can try using a String of Ears belt or an Eye of Etlich amulet. You can also try and swap Spirit Vessel out for Swampland Attunement. You can also use a Hellfire amulet to get an additional passive and use a Unity instead of The Compass Rose.
Increased pickup radius is a nice thing to have from Swampland Attunement. Just saying.
I'm confused as to why Quetzalcoatl is used and why it would deal double damage. All it says is that your dots deal the damage in 1/2 the duration, not that there is more total damage. Aren't you just waiting around for sacred harvester to come off cooldown anyways to explode all of that DoT damage?
Wouldn't The Grin Reaper be better in the cube to have more haunt and swarm dots being put out there?
You don't lose the effect of the dagger when you put something in the cube. You gain an additional effect.
We should probably stop with quote pyramid
No. The cube allows you to store legendary effects. You can then activate the legendary effect of 1 weapon/offhand, 1 armor and 1 jewelry piece.
In this build, I recommend holding the dagger and activating the furnace in the cube. I am listing Wormwood as an alternative
This has already been answered but I'll do my best to explain it.
Quetzalcoatl: Locust Swarm and Haunt now deal their damage in half of the normal duration. (Another way to think about it is to say that it makes your DoTs tick twice as fast.)
Raiment of the Jade Harvester (6pc): Soul Harvest consumes your damage over time effects on enemies, instantly dealing 150 seconds worth of remaining damage.
Creeping Death: Your Haunt, Locust Swarm and the damage amplification from Piranhas last almost forever. (3600 seconds)
Say your Haunt deals 1000 damage over 10 seconds. What Quetzalcoatl will do is make your Haunt deal 1000 damage over 5 seconds.
Damage done in 10 seconds without Quetzalcoatl = 1000. Damage Per Second = 1000/10 = 100
Damage done in 5 seconds with Quetzalcoatl = 1000. Damage Per Second = 1000/5 = 200
With Creeping Death, Haunt will last 3600 seconds (or 60 minutes). Add Quetzalcoatl and it'll make Haunt deal the same damage except over 1800 seconds (or 30 minutes). Add the Jade 6pc to deal 150 seconds worth of Haunt damage instantly and we get the following
Without Quetz: 100 DPS x 150 seconds = 15000
With Quetz: 200 DPS x 150 seconds = 30000
The problem with using Grin Reaper in this build is that Haunt and Locust Swarm from your clones do not stack.