So they've changed the percentages for all the sacrifice abilities. I'm not sure if they're going to add affixes that improve rune effects, but if not, it seems as if sacrifice has taken a massive hit, though I'm sure it'll be balanced out. The main concern is the Next of Kin rune. In the past you could get the rez percentage on Next of Kin up to 70%, now it sits at 35%... It was by far the most important rune for a sacrifice build.
Anyways... here's what you can expect from the new percentages:
What this means is that when you sacrifice 4 dogs, you have an 18% chance to be left with 0 dogs, 38% to be left with 1, 31% to be left with 2, 11% to be left with 3 and only 2% to get 4 dogs back.
On average you'll be sacrificing somewhere around 7 dogs total over the course of about 3 casts, for an average of 1400% damage over let's say 3sec. And that's probably rounding up to be honest... Once your dogs are gone (after only using sacrifice 3 times) you'll have to 1) Resummon, 2) Mass Confuse or 3) Use Big Bad Voodoo in order to get 4 dogs again (or you can just continue to kill things and benefit from the 5% Circle of Life Passive).
This new percentage definitely reinforces the idea that even though just about every skill in a sacrifice build is designed to allow you to use it more often, it's still more of a secondary ability because you can't continually cast it. This will be more true in higher difficulties of course where things are harder to kill.
3/4 of your abilities that get dogs back require enemies to die. So if you're not killing things, all you have is Resummon (60 sec CD). And if it's on cooldown and you're out of dogs you'll have to rely on Explosive Beast and GotD. Even though this is a sacrifice build, you'll be casting Explosive Beast most of the time it seems.
I'm less sure about this being a top tier build than I was before they changed these percentages... I'm not sure Sacrifice does enough damage at this point. I guess only time will tell.
Yeah, I'm wondering if 20% is the limit on Provoke the Pack, or if you can maybe get up to 40% with one of the runes for Big Bad Voodoo or Mass Confusion. I'm guessing that 20% is the limit most likely, but who knows. They need to get rid of all these abilities that just increase your damage by some base percentage, they're all pretty boring.
A sacrifice build before was extremely based on having high end runestones already, so this really doesn't change much. They weren't going to be all that great getting through Inferno, and were going to be even less leading up to it, because the scaling of the proc chacnes didn't get to favorable numbers until the runestones that were going to be dropping in Inferno.
Because of the need for either skills, passives, or runestones in order to continously provide dogs (usually a combination of several of those) you were loosing out on a great deal of utility, and if you ran into some monster or group that for some reason made sacrifice no good, you were using a useless build. It already wasn't a top tier build concept, and now it's going to be even worse. At best it was going to be a situational skill to use when you could guarantee you would get your dogs back quickly, which meant the CD on summon zombie dogs was up, and even then you were letting you main means of defence go away. Mass Confusion is going to be a crappy skill to summon dogs with because charm effects (and don't get confused it says confusion but it's a charm effect) means that you can't attack those enemies anyway, so they have to have dots on them, or be surrounded by other monsters that will kill them in order to eve have the chance of proccing the dog.
BBV was the best of them, and is still relatively good for building up dogs, while CoL is one of the worse ones, but at least the range can be extended, even though pickup radius is buggy, and it seems like increasing it only works after the base 12 yards, which will make it difficult to increase until later on, but it's hard to judge if it's working properly or not because of how messed up the measurement system is in Diablo.
All in all though it doesn't surprise me they nerfed the chances, sacrifice builds had the chance of becoming the obvious best build for WD's with level 7 runestones, which could have been purchased early in the game once a few months had gone by, thus making them OP for most of the game, this change makes it more of a risk verses reward style of play that fits in better in terms of balance with the other skills the class has.
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Well, as I've said in the past, the build probably didn't rely on R7 runestones like a lot of people seem to think. The way the percentages worked before, sacrifice would've been really good throughout the game in my opinion. Which is why they nerfed the Next of Kin percentage to below what the R1 percentage would've been (I'm assuming R1 used to be 40%). And it's why they nerfed a lot of the other aspects of this build to below the R4 level. When you take into account the percentages for health globes on Death Is Life and Final Gift and combine it with Gruesome Feast it's hard to deny that the build would've been extremely good throughout the game.
As for where the percentages are now, I'm less sure about how good it will be. But one way to look at it is to think about is how easily other classes can do 1400% damage over 3 casts, and also think about whether or not that's enough damage (with the right weapon) to keep getting new dogs. I'm not really sure...
As for Mass Confusion, I didn't realize you couldn't attack charmed enemies. It just means you have to plan a bit more when using it. You just have to make sure enemies are low enough on HP that they'll get killed while under its effects. Definitely makes it harder to use, but still manageable.
This video shows a little bit of how it works. I'm just wondering if charmed enemies will take damage from something like GotD...
Overall I'd at least like to see them make the percentages on Next of Kin and Death is Life a little bit higher... seems like Blizzard went a bit too far with the nerfs to this.
I think the sacrifice build will be manageble, even with those massive nerfs.
First i would like to say that i think Grave Injustice is 100% essential in this build. You have 3 abilities to spawn dogs (Mass Confusion, Summon Zombie Dogs and BBV) all with long cooldowns. Reducing cooldown by enemies killed drastically increase the ratio in which you can respawn more dogs. Assuming all those abiltiies are able to summon 4 dogs, you can respawn 4 dogs every 24 seconds (avarage). Taking in consideration you have certain chances from Next of Kin and Circle of Life to trigger you will little more dogd then that. Now if you manage to kill 24 monsters every 12 seconds you can theorically free spam sacrifice non stop.
I think thats a solid build, the problem is how to use sacrifice. I think 200% weapon damage is alot but 12 yards isn't much. Since the dogs have a tendency to stay together it looks like they will explode almost in the same place dealing huge 800% damage, but overkilling most enemies. I think it has a bad pattern and usuallt are not effective to deal with large hordes of enemies (you will one shot a group of 10 or so monsters and then have to spend a cooldown to deal with the rest).
This is why you can't count only on sacrifice. The buold have to somewhat solid in order to save sacrifices for Elite monsters.
Also i think the whole health globes + gruesome feast thingy will not work. Gruesome Feast duration is super small... I feel like you will pick globes after the fight and gets buffed when all enemies are dead and before you gace the next group the buff will wear off. Also the health globe drop ration from Final Gift is horrible.. Relying in such small chances just to buff your int for a couple of seconds is not a good strategy.
One thing to keep in my mind about Sacrifice builds is that you have really strong cirstantial damage without costing any mana. There still a huge untaped resource in this build and it's the large mana pool without being used in anyway. This is why I choose Spirirt Barrage: it's a really strong skill that costs really high mana. Hopefully it will help you deal with monster without having to spam sacrifice in every corner.
I think Grasp of the Dead works well because it's a skill with good damage/area ratio and snare enemies. Also it's cooldown is reduces by grave injustice so you might be able to possibly to use it multiple times in the same fight.
I'm just yhere to share more ideas on how to make this crazy build works.
But without a snare, your survivability becomes really questionable... but you don't get the same number of health globes you used to get with Death is Life / Final Gift. So I could see swapping in GotD with Groping Eels.
I think the sacrifice build will be manageble, even with those massive nerfs.
First i would like to say that i think Grave Injustice is 100% essential in this build. You have 3 abilities to spawn dogs (Mass Confusion, Summon Zombie Dogs and BBV) all with long cooldowns. Reducing cooldown by enemies killed drastically increase the ratio in which you can respawn more dogs. Assuming all those abiltiies are able to summon 4 dogs, you can respawn 4 dogs every 24 seconds (avarage). Taking in consideration you have certain chances from Next of Kin and Circle of Life to trigger you will little more dogd then that. Now if you manage to kill 24 monsters every 12 seconds you can theorically free spam sacrifice non stop.
I think thats a solid build, the problem is how to use sacrifice. I think 200% weapon damage is alot but 12 yards isn't much. Since the dogs have a tendency to stay together it looks like they will explode almost in the same place dealing huge 800% damage, but overkilling most enemies. I think it has a bad pattern and usuallt are not effective to deal with large hordes of enemies (you will one shot a group of 10 or so monsters and then have to spend a cooldown to deal with the rest).
This is why you can't count only on sacrifice. The buold have to somewhat solid in order to save sacrifices for Elite monsters.
Also i think the whole health globes + gruesome feast thingy will not work. Gruesome Feast duration is super small... I feel like you will pick globes after the fight and gets buffed when all enemies are dead and before you gace the next group the buff will wear off. Also the health globe drop ration from Final Gift is horrible.. Relying in such small chances just to buff your int for a couple of seconds is not a good strategy.
One thing to keep in my mind about Sacrifice builds is that you have really strong cirstantial damage without costing any mana. There still a huge untaped resource in this build and it's the large mana pool without being used in anyway. This is why I choose Spirirt Barrage: it's a really strong skill that costs really high mana. Hopefully it will help you deal with monster without having to spam sacrifice in every corner.
I think Grasp of the Dead works well because it's a skill with good damage/area ratio and snare enemies. Also it's cooldown is reduces by grave injustice so you might be able to possibly to use it multiple times in the same fight.
I'm just yhere to share more ideas on how to make this crazy build works.
I think your build is definetly good. But i loved so much ZD final gitf with sacrifice next of kin before the patch because of it's possibility to be very strong versus bosses and big mobs. Now, globe oriented builds are really nice but most likely versus big pack of mobs and trash. I will still be playing globe producing oriented builds like yours. Altho, they definetly removed some of my enthusiams towards some of the build ideas i had.
But without a snare, your survivability becomes really questionable... but you don't get the same number of health globes you used to get with Death is Life / Final Gift. So I could see swapping in GotD with Groping Eels.
nice build. except since confusion has such a long CD and BBVD has double that i would replace BBVD with wall of zombie - pile on. it does 800% dmg every 25 seconds. and since its close range and with grave injustice reducing the CD itll make it so you can do a hell of a lot more dmg with this build. when i tested circle of life in the beta that 5% seemed to be very forgiving and it was VERY easy to get all 3 dogs back quickly. but obviously slower killing in inferno but with all the crazy sacrifice dmg and pile on i think you'll mow down enemies
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"once the pretty hardcore gamers we had testing inferno found it fairly difficult, we then we doubled it" -trolololol jay wilson
I think the sacrifice build will be manageble, even with those massive nerfs.
First i would like to say that i think Grave Injustice is 100% essential in this build. You have 3 abilities to spawn dogs (Mass Confusion, Summon Zombie Dogs and BBV) all with long cooldowns. Reducing cooldown by enemies killed drastically increase the ratio in which you can respawn more dogs. Assuming all those abiltiies are able to summon 4 dogs, you can respawn 4 dogs every 24 seconds (avarage). Taking in consideration you have certain chances from Next of Kin and Circle of Life to trigger you will little more dogd then that. Now if you manage to kill 24 monsters every 12 seconds you can theorically free spam sacrifice non stop.
This is why you can't count only on sacrifice. The buold have to somewhat solid in order to save sacrifices for Elite monsters.
Also i think the whole health globes + gruesome feast thingy will not work. Gruesome Feast duration is super small... I feel like you will pick globes after the fight and gets buffed when all enemies are dead and before you gace the next group the buff will wear off. Also the health globe drop ration from Final Gift is horrible.. Relying in such small chances just to buff your int for a couple of seconds is not a good strategy.
Only 2 skills, 2 passives, and one rune are absolutely mandatory. This will keep the combo pretty much operational and leaves you with 4 skill slots and 1 passive slot to work with. You are right, you cannot count on Sacrifice, sometimes the combo will simply fizzle. You really need 2 more dps spells, an aoe and a single target. Something like Dart/Swarm or Dire Bats/Cloud. Since you now have two mana drains, you need sustain. This is why people pick Gruesome Feast, it is either that or Spiritual Attunement and Feast wins out when you consider the int buff and the obvious synergy with Final Gift, which already stood out as one of the best runes for Sac. There are only 2 skill slots left, and we desperately need either Grasp of he Dead, Horrify, or Spirit Walk and the combo could really use some gas, either Confusion or Big Bad Voodoo. I think Horrify and Spirit Walk are best when you are using their runes specifically for hp/mana sustain, so I take Grasp. Grasp almost seems core to the build, Grave Injustice nearly lets you cast it at your discretion and it has great utility in clumping monsters together. Confusion beats BBV because it actually facilitates kills, has 1/2 the cooldown(should stagger nicely with Dogs cooldown,) and clumps monsters together like Grasp.
Having only 3 dogs is certainly less important now...
Sacrifice has become pretty boring in my opinion. Getting to sacrifice only like 7 dogs on average is extremely lame. It'd be much better if they reduced the damage it did but increased the "Next of Kin" percentage.
You're not going to get much enjoyment out of blowing up dogs if you only get to do it once and then you're just left with a single dog. It's just not as cool as something like Corpse Explosion was in D2 where you could keep spamming it blowing up things all over the screen.
I mean... at 35% you have almost a 20% chance to go from 4 dogs to 0. Getting to cast sacrifice once 1/5 of the time sucks.
I mean at the previous 55% you had a 76% chance to go from 4 dogs to 2 or more.
I'd just go with another build at this point lol... a 71% chance to go from 3 to either 1 or 0. The Pile On rune for Zombie wall probably works out to be more damage than Sacrifice. I wouldn't be surprised.
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So they've changed the percentages for all the sacrifice abilities. I'm not sure if they're going to add affixes that improve rune effects, but if not, it seems as if sacrifice has taken a massive hit, though I'm sure it'll be balanced out. The main concern is the Next of Kin rune. In the past you could get the rez percentage on Next of Kin up to 70%, now it sits at 35%... It was by far the most important rune for a sacrifice build.
Anyways... here's what you can expect from the new percentages:
What this means is that when you sacrifice 4 dogs, you have an 18% chance to be left with 0 dogs, 38% to be left with 1, 31% to be left with 2, 11% to be left with 3 and only 2% to get 4 dogs back.
On average you'll be sacrificing somewhere around 7 dogs total over the course of about 3 casts, for an average of 1400% damage over let's say 3sec. And that's probably rounding up to be honest... Once your dogs are gone (after only using sacrifice 3 times) you'll have to 1) Resummon, 2) Mass Confuse or 3) Use Big Bad Voodoo in order to get 4 dogs again (or you can just continue to kill things and benefit from the 5% Circle of Life Passive).
This new percentage definitely reinforces the idea that even though just about every skill in a sacrifice build is designed to allow you to use it more often, it's still more of a secondary ability because you can't continually cast it. This will be more true in higher difficulties of course where things are harder to kill.
3/4 of your abilities that get dogs back require enemies to die. So if you're not killing things, all you have is Resummon (60 sec CD). And if it's on cooldown and you're out of dogs you'll have to rely on Explosive Beast and GotD. Even though this is a sacrifice build, you'll be casting Explosive Beast most of the time it seems.
I'm less sure about this being a top tier build than I was before they changed these percentages... I'm not sure Sacrifice does enough damage at this point. I guess only time will tell.
A QUADRILLION MAGIC FIND is worthless if you can't kill shit!
Because of the need for either skills, passives, or runestones in order to continously provide dogs (usually a combination of several of those) you were loosing out on a great deal of utility, and if you ran into some monster or group that for some reason made sacrifice no good, you were using a useless build. It already wasn't a top tier build concept, and now it's going to be even worse. At best it was going to be a situational skill to use when you could guarantee you would get your dogs back quickly, which meant the CD on summon zombie dogs was up, and even then you were letting you main means of defence go away. Mass Confusion is going to be a crappy skill to summon dogs with because charm effects (and don't get confused it says confusion but it's a charm effect) means that you can't attack those enemies anyway, so they have to have dots on them, or be surrounded by other monsters that will kill them in order to eve have the chance of proccing the dog.
BBV was the best of them, and is still relatively good for building up dogs, while CoL is one of the worse ones, but at least the range can be extended, even though pickup radius is buggy, and it seems like increasing it only works after the base 12 yards, which will make it difficult to increase until later on, but it's hard to judge if it's working properly or not because of how messed up the measurement system is in Diablo.
All in all though it doesn't surprise me they nerfed the chances, sacrifice builds had the chance of becoming the obvious best build for WD's with level 7 runestones, which could have been purchased early in the game once a few months had gone by, thus making them OP for most of the game, this change makes it more of a risk verses reward style of play that fits in better in terms of balance with the other skills the class has.
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As for where the percentages are now, I'm less sure about how good it will be. But one way to look at it is to think about is how easily other classes can do 1400% damage over 3 casts, and also think about whether or not that's enough damage (with the right weapon) to keep getting new dogs. I'm not really sure...
As for Mass Confusion, I didn't realize you couldn't attack charmed enemies. It just means you have to plan a bit more when using it. You just have to make sure enemies are low enough on HP that they'll get killed while under its effects. Definitely makes it harder to use, but still manageable.
This video shows a little bit of how it works. I'm just wondering if charmed enemies will take damage from something like GotD...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBvNAJ2Mifc
Overall I'd at least like to see them make the percentages on Next of Kin and Death is Life a little bit higher... seems like Blizzard went a bit too far with the nerfs to this.
First i would like to say that i think Grave Injustice is 100% essential in this build. You have 3 abilities to spawn dogs (Mass Confusion, Summon Zombie Dogs and BBV) all with long cooldowns. Reducing cooldown by enemies killed drastically increase the ratio in which you can respawn more dogs. Assuming all those abiltiies are able to summon 4 dogs, you can respawn 4 dogs every 24 seconds (avarage). Taking in consideration you have certain chances from Next of Kin and Circle of Life to trigger you will little more dogd then that. Now if you manage to kill 24 monsters every 12 seconds you can theorically free spam sacrifice non stop.
I think thats a solid build, the problem is how to use sacrifice. I think 200% weapon damage is alot but 12 yards isn't much. Since the dogs have a tendency to stay together it looks like they will explode almost in the same place dealing huge 800% damage, but overkilling most enemies. I think it has a bad pattern and usuallt are not effective to deal with large hordes of enemies (you will one shot a group of 10 or so monsters and then have to spend a cooldown to deal with the rest).
This is why you can't count only on sacrifice. The buold have to somewhat solid in order to save sacrifices for Elite monsters.
Also i think the whole health globes + gruesome feast thingy will not work. Gruesome Feast duration is super small... I feel like you will pick globes after the fight and gets buffed when all enemies are dead and before you gace the next group the buff will wear off. Also the health globe drop ration from Final Gift is horrible.. Relying in such small chances just to buff your int for a couple of seconds is not a good strategy.
This is my sacrifice build. http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#gSYZQj!SWb!ZZbaZc
One thing to keep in my mind about Sacrifice builds is that you have really strong cirstantial damage without costing any mana. There still a huge untaped resource in this build and it's the large mana pool without being used in anyway. This is why I choose Spirirt Barrage: it's a really strong skill that costs really high mana. Hopefully it will help you deal with monster without having to spam sacrifice in every corner.
I think Grasp of the Dead works well because it's a skill with good damage/area ratio and snare enemies. Also it's cooldown is reduces by grave injustice so you might be able to possibly to use it multiple times in the same fight.
I'm just yhere to share more ideas on how to make this crazy build works.
This is probably what I'd go with at this point... I might get rid of Final Gift though, I dunno.
http://us.battle.net...RYQj!bSW!YZYbZc
But without a snare, your survivability becomes really questionable... but you don't get the same number of health globes you used to get with Death is Life / Final Gift. So I could see swapping in GotD with Groping Eels.
I think your build is definetly good. But i loved so much ZD final gitf with sacrifice next of kin before the patch because of it's possibility to be very strong versus bosses and big mobs. Now, globe oriented builds are really nice but most likely versus big pack of mobs and trash. I will still be playing globe producing oriented builds like yours. Altho, they definetly removed some of my enthusiams towards some of the build ideas i had.
nice build. except since confusion has such a long CD and BBVD has double that i would replace BBVD with wall of zombie - pile on. it does 800% dmg every 25 seconds. and since its close range and with grave injustice reducing the CD itll make it so you can do a hell of a lot more dmg with this build. when i tested circle of life in the beta that 5% seemed to be very forgiving and it was VERY easy to get all 3 dogs back quickly. but obviously slower killing in inferno but with all the crazy sacrifice dmg and pile on i think you'll mow down enemies
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#..YS..21bcW!bS!...Z
Only 2 skills, 2 passives, and one rune are absolutely mandatory. This will keep the combo pretty much operational and leaves you with 4 skill slots and 1 passive slot to work with. You are right, you cannot count on Sacrifice, sometimes the combo will simply fizzle. You really need 2 more dps spells, an aoe and a single target. Something like Dart/Swarm or Dire Bats/Cloud. Since you now have two mana drains, you need sustain. This is why people pick Gruesome Feast, it is either that or Spiritual Attunement and Feast wins out when you consider the int buff and the obvious synergy with Final Gift, which already stood out as one of the best runes for Sac. There are only 2 skill slots left, and we desperately need either Grasp of he Dead, Horrify, or Spirit Walk and the combo could really use some gas, either Confusion or Big Bad Voodoo. I think Horrify and Spirit Walk are best when you are using their runes specifically for hp/mana sustain, so I take Grasp. Grasp almost seems core to the build, Grave Injustice nearly lets you cast it at your discretion and it has great utility in clumping monsters together. Confusion beats BBV because it actually facilitates kills, has 1/2 the cooldown(should stagger nicely with Dogs cooldown,) and clumps monsters together like Grasp.
This is my current version
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#VeYSZQ!cbS!acbZZZ
Sacrifice has become pretty boring in my opinion. Getting to sacrifice only like 7 dogs on average is extremely lame. It'd be much better if they reduced the damage it did but increased the "Next of Kin" percentage.
You're not going to get much enjoyment out of blowing up dogs if you only get to do it once and then you're just left with a single dog. It's just not as cool as something like Corpse Explosion was in D2 where you could keep spamming it blowing up things all over the screen.
I mean... at 35% you have almost a 20% chance to go from 4 dogs to 0. Getting to cast sacrifice once 1/5 of the time sucks.
I mean at the previous 55% you had a 76% chance to go from 4 dogs to 2 or more.
The difference isn't massive, but the lower that Next of Kin percentage gets the more boring sacrifice becomes, regardless of how much damage it does.
And FYI... this is what you're looking at percentage wise if you only have 3 dogs.
I'd just go with another build at this point lol... a 71% chance to go from 3 to either 1 or 0. The Pile On rune for Zombie wall probably works out to be more damage than Sacrifice. I wouldn't be surprised.