Sacrifice looks like it is going to be a great damage dealing spell. I want to have a zombie focused WD and use Zombie Charger and Sacrifice as my main damage dealing spells. I originally wanted to use Zombie Dogs and Sacrifice as my main spells and Parasite as a means to keep my Zombie Dog numbers at a decent place to be used to Sacrifice as a chunk of my damage.
How do you guys think Parasite spawned Zombie Dogs will effect your normally summoned ones. On top of that how do you guess a build with no points in Zombie Dogs, using Parasite spawned Dogs as Sacrifices, would work? Do you think that this would be possible? Thanks for all the ideas!
Assuming they die from the parasite... I think using locust swarm + parasite in a combination would be really effective. Because a zombie dog spawned from a parasite will obviously function exactly like a normally summoned zombie dog, hence why I see no reason in putting points in the actually summoning spell.
I think using locust swarm + parasite -> sacrifice will get you some serious AoE damage, along with the locust dot to pick off low hp targets. The question if this is viable mana-wise since we don't know how much parasite costs yet.
I see where your coming from with the mana cost. I would assume Zombie Dogs would cost almost nothing being the WD "auto-attack" and all. I dont see parasite being spammable. Mana would almost definitively be an issue for this build. Anyone else for input?
I'm not totally up to date on the skills, but wouldn't it make sense that the damage done by sacrifice has something to do with the dog's level/hp? And that could be influenced by the zombie dog skill?
Furthermore, do we know if locust swarm does enough damage to be good at taking out enemies (which is needed to get that first dog, at least if you don't put many points into ZD. Finally, it seems like you would be rather weak until the skills were unlocked, with swarm being 10 (mid way through normal, I believe), and parasite being lvl 26 (maybe act 1, nightmare)? Of course, this is assuming I'm not mis-remembering the idea that Blizz wanted 20 lvls per difficultly.
Also, I agree with jazman, that mana will be a major limiter of this build (I can't see parasite being cheap).
I'm not totally up to date on the skills, but wouldn't it make sense that the damage done by sacrifice has something to do with the dog's level/hp? And that could be influenced by the zombie dog skill?
I'd imagine it would be more dependent on the level of Sacrifice, though the dog might play into it as well.
As to the topic, what I'm curious about is whether Parasite will allow you to have more dogs than the limit on just the regular summoning skill. If so, it'd definitely be worth it to take both if you're making a dog build. Depending on how effective your Sacrifice is, Parasite might also be a great way to get the damage from Sacrifice without actually losing a dog (Sac kills Parasite, spawns dog). I definitely think Skills like Locust Swarm and Haunt that bounce around between enemies would be good choices for this build.
I assume the rank 1 Zombie Dog spell and Rank 15 Zombie Dog spell will have arround the same damage, just the ammount of health they have is more in comparison, same with Rank 1 and 15 of the Parasite spell. Why?
1. Because blizzard said they were deadly but fragile.
2. Because it makes sense if you don't want to force people into making them useful by spending 15 points.
3. Only spending one point will not get you the best Zombie Dogs, but their damage will still be good, especialy if you can protect them with other spells which you might focus in.
4. The sacrifice spell doesn't really care about their health as far as I know, and it doesn't make sense to be required to spend 30 points to make a spell useful with the ammount of customization they want.
Keeping the damage arround the same works with most spells if adding ranks increases other things with the spell, especialy if you consider non-damage spells which you would otherwise never add more then 1 rank to in most cases. This lets you choose more then one damage spell which you can use instead of 1-2 with 15 ranks while never using your other damage spells.
I assume 15 ranks is the max in hell, as that was the last thing I heard, assume 15 = Max if I'm wrong though.
From what ive read sacrifice damage is based on ZD health. Whats not known is whether that is max health (ZD lvl) or remaining health before the Sacrifice was made. I sure hope that it is max health. It makes more balancing since to me and it wouldnt be very fun to summon a dog just to kill it off again for max Sac damage. Perhaps more points in ZD would result in more ZD numberwise and also more health. That would make more points in ZD look very good for a Sac WD.
I've spent a lot of time considering this because with these spells the Doc seems like the only class that ha skills that are dependent on having other skills. Is it possible to use Sacrifice without and zombie dogs? if not then the Doc's build pool is shrunk considerably when compared to the other classes as far as we know...
In terms of how the skills will work, I think that the damage a sacrificed dog does is based on % missing health, and that higher rank Dogs have more health allowing you to get higher %missing ( a dog with 10 health will get one shot so you must sac at full, a dog with 200 health can be sac'ed at 1% as an extreme example) While Zombie dog skill increases the health/atk Speed/number of dogs you can have etc. with minor (but not insignificant) increases to damage. Parasite will probably boost the number of dogs you can have as well and increase its damage output as you rank it up. Just my opinion though...and then there is always rune effects.
Now I have had an interesting thought, can Sacrifice be used at all if you take no summoning? or if you have no dogs? I think it would be cool if it had another use outside of dog/summon builds but that might come off as a bit cheesy or feel really weak from a design standpoint. maybe you can cast sacrifice on you're self to deal AoE damage around where you stand while dealing some damage to you. Either flat damage or a percentage of your Health. I dunno. I just feel bad that the Doc is the only class to have skills that require the player to have other skills.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
If that made sense to you, Bravo! I think I even confused myself...
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
How do you guys think Parasite spawned Zombie Dogs will effect your normally summoned ones. On top of that how do you guess a build with no points in Zombie Dogs, using Parasite spawned Dogs as Sacrifices, would work? Do you think that this would be possible? Thanks for all the ideas!
I see where your coming from with the mana cost. I would assume Zombie Dogs would cost almost nothing being the WD "auto-attack" and all. I dont see parasite being spammable. Mana would almost definitively be an issue for this build. Anyone else for input?
Furthermore, do we know if locust swarm does enough damage to be good at taking out enemies (which is needed to get that first dog, at least if you don't put many points into ZD. Finally, it seems like you would be rather weak until the skills were unlocked, with swarm being 10 (mid way through normal, I believe), and parasite being lvl 26 (maybe act 1, nightmare)? Of course, this is assuming I'm not mis-remembering the idea that Blizz wanted 20 lvls per difficultly.
Also, I agree with jazman, that mana will be a major limiter of this build (I can't see parasite being cheap).
I'd imagine it would be more dependent on the level of Sacrifice, though the dog might play into it as well.
As to the topic, what I'm curious about is whether Parasite will allow you to have more dogs than the limit on just the regular summoning skill. If so, it'd definitely be worth it to take both if you're making a dog build. Depending on how effective your Sacrifice is, Parasite might also be a great way to get the damage from Sacrifice without actually losing a dog (Sac kills Parasite, spawns dog). I definitely think Skills like Locust Swarm and Haunt that bounce around between enemies would be good choices for this build.
From what ive read sacrifice damage is based on ZD health. Whats not known is whether that is max health (ZD lvl) or remaining health before the Sacrifice was made. I sure hope that it is max health. It makes more balancing since to me and it wouldnt be very fun to summon a dog just to kill it off again for max Sac damage. Perhaps more points in ZD would result in more ZD numberwise and also more health. That would make more points in ZD look very good for a Sac WD.
In terms of how the skills will work, I think that the damage a sacrificed dog does is based on % missing health, and that higher rank Dogs have more health allowing you to get higher %missing ( a dog with 10 health will get one shot so you must sac at full, a dog with 200 health can be sac'ed at 1% as an extreme example) While Zombie dog skill increases the health/atk Speed/number of dogs you can have etc. with minor (but not insignificant) increases to damage. Parasite will probably boost the number of dogs you can have as well and increase its damage output as you rank it up. Just my opinion though...and then there is always rune effects.
Now I have had an interesting thought, can Sacrifice be used at all if you take no summoning? or if you have no dogs? I think it would be cool if it had another use outside of dog/summon builds but that might come off as a bit cheesy or feel really weak from a design standpoint. maybe you can cast sacrifice on you're self to deal AoE damage around where you stand while dealing some damage to you. Either flat damage or a percentage of your Health. I dunno. I just feel bad that the Doc is the only class to have skills that require the player to have other skills.