I was playing with the skill calc and got up with this solution:
Alabaster on Sacrifice (and Mass Confusion) should help regenerate pets quickly, Soul harvest should boost damage and obsidian is for CC (also Mass confusion for CC).
Gargantuan should act as a moving shield (with additional damage) while Haunt is for picking up single targets (Sacrifice is kinda AoE and we can't choose which target they attack)
Passives:
Zombie Handler increase number of zombie dogs thus more damage, also it increase pets healt so Gargantuan should last longer when used as a shield.
I picked up Vision Quest as a mana regen since 4 skill out of 6 have CD.
Grave Injustice should reduce cooldowns and so help me deal damage faster.
Dunno if this will work since I can't predict how fast monster will be killed and how often zombie dogs will spawn due to runestones effects.
I think I'll try something like that, if impending changes to skills and runestones does not change it all.
Your thoughts?
edit: the last passive is Grave Injustice, dunno why it shows Vermin. Time to bother Molster once more, he's gonna hate me.
your missing the most important ability for trying to spam sacrifice. circle of life passive
It's a valid alternative and I thought about it but...Circle of life gives 5% chance to spawn Zombie dog from killed enemies in a set radius...I think it could be a better choice in a party, where if you are not so lucky with chances your companions can buy you some time. Also they'll increase your "killing ratio" thus increasing your chances to summon pets.
Maybe I should have pointed out I'm going to play mostly single player, so I prefer to not rely too much on chances.
I took Grave injustice because I'd like to reduce cooldowns (4 out of 6 are skills with CD).
I should be able to cast skills more often, that should give me more tactical handling and allow me to summon pets quickly, be it by chance (alabaster on Mass Confusion has higher chance to spawn ZDs, on sacrifice gives me 55% chance per pet even if no enemy dies) or simply by reducing CD on Summon Zombie Dogs.
I just think it will suit me better.
edit: If I had sufficient mana regen I'd swap Vision Quest with Circle of life, but I've a feeling late in game resource management will be vital.
This is my take on sacrificer build. My basic strategy is: Let dogs tank, use grasp of the dead and severance spirit walk for huge damage (700% weapon damage). Pin point the remaining targets with fire darts. Grave Injustice will recharge grasp of the dead and spirit walk in case those abilities kill my enemies. Otherwise I cast sacrifice for huge AoE damage. Theres good chance half my dogs will come back and i keep playing with 2 dogs. Also, killed enemies will respawn dogs via circle of life.
In case I run out out of dog i use Mass Confusion. This gives me time to kill my enemies AND gimme huge chance to respawn my dogs. I think i can easilly spawn 4 dogs with it.
So I have two skills to spawn 4 dogs, which one with 60 seconds cooldown. It means 4 dogs every 30 seconds. Sacrifice only consumes half of my dog army, which means i can cast it every 15 seconds. For each dead enemy it's cooldown is further reduced. I think i will cast it whenever I need to.
@sunturion
I prefer Mass Confusion because it has a shorter cooldown and should have higher chance to spawn Zombie Dogs than Big Bad Voodoo (78% vs 60% in the example).
Also there is a chance that some enemy will fight for me, killing the ones weakened by Sacrifice (or being killed themselves) or buying me time at the very least.
If I where to play in a party I'll probably pick up Big Bad Voodoo since it will give a nice boost to my allies.
@italofoca
I think we took different paths to the same goal, your main damage sinergy is GotD + Spirit Walk + sacrifice , mine is soul harvest + haunt + sacrifice. You are a bit more on the offensive (Flaming Dart) while I'm a bit more on the defensive side (gargantuan)
As things are now, it's actually going to be pretty difficult to keep dogs up that you can sacrifice. Sacrifice does a ton of damage but you'll have a hard time keeping the dogs up in order to keep using it. In my opinion, it's more of a secondary skill that you use when you can, but you also need another skill to use as your main form of damage.
My thinking is that when you get R7 runes and the % to rez dogs gets really high, the monsters you're fighting will be much harder to kill, to the point where sacrificing all your dogs once (with sacrifice alabaster rune) won't be nearly enough to kill them.
Basically you're not going to have that many dogs to sacrifice with most of these builds, I don't know if they're bad builds or not, but you probably won't be using sacrifice as much as you think.
@sacridoc well, obviously this is a theoretical exercise since we know very little about the game (and what we know may change soontm ).
Gear is something I never consider when trying to imagine how a build would work.
I agree (and hope) that in Inferno things will be much more challenging.
You can figure out the probability of keeping the dogs up though, somebody did it on another fan site. I did the same thing to see for myself.
Basically what you find is that, on average, even at rank 7, you can only cast sacrifice like 7 times (sacrificing 14 dogs) before you run out of dogs (using only next of kin). That's like 2800% weapon dmg / 7sec (assuming 1cast/sec) which is good damage, especially since it's AoE. But once those dogs are gone you're kind of screwed, so you have to make sure whatever you're trying to kill dies when the dogs do in most cases (at least with my build).
Since you won't have R7 runes until Inferno, I would guess that you won't kill a pack of Inferno mobs in 7secs, but I could be wrong depending on gear. And who knows... maybe there's gear that increases chance to spawn dogs.
But the way sacrifice is now, it does a lot of damage but goes away really fast and in general you have to kill things in order to spawn more dogs.
Also, I think that "Final Gift" is pretty important for a sacrifice build, especially in Inferno. I wouldn't be suprised if you have to keep sacrificing dogs just to stay alive using the globes in Inferno (from what blizzard has said about how hard it is).
I'm not very good at math either unfortunately, but I eventually figured it out after some frustration, using this site: http://stattrek.com/...s/binomial.aspx
You end up with tables that look like this. So basically if you start with 4 dogs, the chance that you'll be able to resurrect 4 more dogs after using sacrifice is only 9% (if you have the R4 rune). And you see that even at 70%, you only have a 24% chance to get 4 dogs back after the first cast.
As for the calculation of how long you will cast sacrifice on average before you run out of dogs... it looks like this: Where the very top row is the number of casts, the middle number is the number of dogs sacrificed and the bottom is % chance to be left with 0 dogs. R6 is 60% (although I think it would 65% in game) and R7 is 70%. It starts with 0.00 because there's a 0% chance that you would be left with 0 dogs before casting sacrifice. I don't specifically remember how to do this calculation (as I said I got it from another site) but I could probably figure it out if I had to, which I don't want to do because like I said I'm pretty bad at math.
So you see at R1, most likely you'll go from 4 dogs>2 dogs>1 dog>0 dogs. For a total of only 3 casts before you're left with no dogs. And there's also a good chance you could go from 4>1>0. Giving you only 2 casts before you run out. At the same time though, there will be times (particularly with the R7 rune) when you get 4 dogs over and over and when that happens your DPS will be insane because all the DPS comes from sacrificing 4 dogs vs just 1 or 2.
OMGGGG that's the last time I try to insert a table into a forum post without knowing how to do it lol >.<
But your efforts are very much appreciated!
Now I just have to persuade my brain to understand it all (I'm like Homer, me and my brain argue a lot)
Thanks a lot!
Alabaster on Sacrifice (and Mass Confusion) should help regenerate pets quickly, Soul harvest should boost damage and obsidian is for CC (also Mass confusion for CC).
Gargantuan should act as a moving shield (with additional damage) while Haunt is for picking up single targets (Sacrifice is kinda AoE and we can't choose which target they attack)
Passives:
Zombie Handler increase number of zombie dogs thus more damage, also it increase pets healt so Gargantuan should last longer when used as a shield.
I picked up Vision Quest as a mana regen since 4 skill out of 6 have CD.
Grave Injustice should reduce cooldowns and so help me deal damage faster.
Dunno if this will work since I can't predict how fast monster will be killed and how often zombie dogs will spawn due to runestones effects.
I think I'll try something like that, if impending changes to skills and runestones does not change it all.
Your thoughts?
edit: the last passive is Grave Injustice, dunno why it shows Vermin. Time to bother Molster once more, he's gonna hate me.
It's a valid alternative and I thought about it but...Circle of life gives 5% chance to spawn Zombie dog from killed enemies in a set radius...I think it could be a better choice in a party, where if you are not so lucky with chances your companions can buy you some time. Also they'll increase your "killing ratio" thus increasing your chances to summon pets.
Maybe I should have pointed out I'm going to play mostly single player, so I prefer to not rely too much on chances.
I took Grave injustice because I'd like to reduce cooldowns (4 out of 6 are skills with CD).
I should be able to cast skills more often, that should give me more tactical handling and allow me to summon pets quickly, be it by chance (alabaster on Mass Confusion has higher chance to spawn ZDs, on sacrifice gives me 55% chance per pet even if no enemy dies) or simply by reducing CD on Summon Zombie Dogs.
I just think it will suit me better.
edit: If I had sufficient mana regen I'd swap Vision Quest with Circle of life, but I've a feeling late in game resource management will be vital.
This is my take on sacrificer build. My basic strategy is: Let dogs tank, use grasp of the dead and severance spirit walk for huge damage (700% weapon damage). Pin point the remaining targets with fire darts. Grave Injustice will recharge grasp of the dead and spirit walk in case those abilities kill my enemies. Otherwise I cast sacrifice for huge AoE damage. Theres good chance half my dogs will come back and i keep playing with 2 dogs. Also, killed enemies will respawn dogs via circle of life.
In case I run out out of dog i use Mass Confusion. This gives me time to kill my enemies AND gimme huge chance to respawn my dogs. I think i can easilly spawn 4 dogs with it.
So I have two skills to spawn 4 dogs, which one with 60 seconds cooldown. It means 4 dogs every 30 seconds. Sacrifice only consumes half of my dog army, which means i can cast it every 15 seconds. For each dead enemy it's cooldown is further reduced. I think i will cast it whenever I need to.
I prefer Mass Confusion because it has a shorter cooldown and should have higher chance to spawn Zombie Dogs than Big Bad Voodoo (78% vs 60% in the example).
Also there is a chance that some enemy will fight for me, killing the ones weakened by Sacrifice (or being killed themselves) or buying me time at the very least.
If I where to play in a party I'll probably pick up Big Bad Voodoo since it will give a nice boost to my allies.
@italofoca
I think we took different paths to the same goal, your main damage sinergy is GotD + Spirit Walk + sacrifice , mine is soul harvest + haunt + sacrifice. You are a bit more on the offensive (Flaming Dart) while I'm a bit more on the defensive side (gargantuan)
My thinking is that when you get R7 runes and the % to rez dogs gets really high, the monsters you're fighting will be much harder to kill, to the point where sacrificing all your dogs once (with sacrifice alabaster rune) won't be nearly enough to kill them.
Basically you're not going to have that many dogs to sacrifice with most of these builds, I don't know if they're bad builds or not, but you probably won't be using sacrifice as much as you think.
<3 your signature build. nice synergy with gruesome feast and sacrifice, i think it has potential.
Gear is something I never consider when trying to imagine how a build would work.
I agree (and hope) that in Inferno things will be much more challenging.
Basically what you find is that, on average, even at rank 7, you can only cast sacrifice like 7 times (sacrificing 14 dogs) before you run out of dogs (using only next of kin). That's like 2800% weapon dmg / 7sec (assuming 1cast/sec) which is good damage, especially since it's AoE. But once those dogs are gone you're kind of screwed, so you have to make sure whatever you're trying to kill dies when the dogs do in most cases (at least with my build).
Since you won't have R7 runes until Inferno, I would guess that you won't kill a pack of Inferno mobs in 7secs, but I could be wrong depending on gear. And who knows... maybe there's gear that increases chance to spawn dogs.
But the way sacrifice is now, it does a lot of damage but goes away really fast and in general you have to kill things in order to spawn more dogs.
Also, I think that "Final Gift" is pretty important for a sacrifice build, especially in Inferno. I wouldn't be suprised if you have to keep sacrificing dogs just to stay alive using the globes in Inferno (from what blizzard has said about how hard it is).
I'm not so good at math but I'll do my best to understand.
You end up with tables that look like this. So basically if you start with 4 dogs, the chance that you'll be able to resurrect 4 more dogs after using sacrifice is only 9% (if you have the R4 rune). And you see that even at 70%, you only have a 24% chance to get 4 dogs back after the first cast.
As for the calculation of how long you will cast sacrifice on average before you run out of dogs... it looks like this: Where the very top row is the number of casts, the middle number is the number of dogs sacrificed and the bottom is % chance to be left with 0 dogs. R6 is 60% (although I think it would 65% in game) and R7 is 70%. It starts with 0.00 because there's a 0% chance that you would be left with 0 dogs before casting sacrifice. I don't specifically remember how to do this calculation (as I said I got it from another site) but I could probably figure it out if I had to, which I don't want to do because like I said I'm pretty bad at math.
Assuming R1 alabaster is 40% it'll look like this:
So you see at R1, most likely you'll go from 4 dogs>2 dogs>1 dog>0 dogs. For a total of only 3 casts before you're left with no dogs. And there's also a good chance you could go from 4>1>0. Giving you only 2 casts before you run out. At the same time though, there will be times (particularly with the R7 rune) when you get 4 dogs over and over and when that happens your DPS will be insane because all the DPS comes from sacrificing 4 dogs vs just 1 or 2.
But your efforts are very much appreciated!
Now I just have to persuade my brain to understand it all (I'm like Homer, me and my brain argue a lot)
Thanks a lot!