Hey all. This is my first time posting here. I don't normally post in forums, but a lot of the information/discussion/tools posted here have helped me a lot, so I thought I'd share this.
Act 2 inferno crushed me because of having such low dps (16k dps, 38k life, 3.4k armor). Basically I just made extremely poor gear choices (no crit, more vit than int, etc.). I died so much I was down to ~100k gold due to repair bills, every elite mob pack was pretty much ruining my day several times over before I could down them, if I could at all. I was using a pretty standard Vision Quest build and getting wrecked.
So I started to dick around with my build a bit to try to mitigate the suck and ended up trying a DOT-based build I'd liked on nightmare. To my surprise, within about half an hour I had five stacks of neph valor and had only died once. Huge change. I noticed in the big DPS thread that others were having a similar issue, so here's my solution:
1) Runes matter. Please check out the whole build rather than just the tooltip.
2) This build depends wholly on kiting. You need increased runspeed on your boots for it to work.
3) This is not boss viable. Great for elite farming, though.
4) Mess with the passives as you see fit. I have little mana regen, so I have to VQ. You may not need to.
5) Set up a force run key binding and use it.
6) Recommended rotation: Pop spirit walk, run into a mob group, locust swarm and siphon, then run out. Cast Grasp and Zombie Wall between you and them. If they're normal mobs, they should melt away in a few ticks. If they're elites or high health, dot each elite individually with haunt. At this point you will want to put as much distance between you and the mobs as possible. Keep kiting and applying Wall/Grasp as needed to slow. Reapply Haunt when it falls off. Reapply locust when your Spirit Walk cooldown is up by spirit walking, running up the mobs, locust (and siphon if needed), and running off.
Breakdown:
On first glance this build looks pretty gimp. And it is. If you have decent dps (above 25k), don't bother with it. However, for those of us who are struggling just to live, this build addresses a lot of common problems.
1) Mobility = Survivability: One of the main problems I was having with my standard VQ build is that when I stood still to cast stuff, I'd get murderated. The WD has notoriously long casting animations. However, haunt does not. You can essentially cast haunt over your shoulder with no IAS and still dodge stuff. It also has a massive range compared to other WD abilities and will seek out its designated target. Locust does have a long casting animation, but this is taken care of because you will be in spirit walk when you are casting it. Also, haunt only has to be refreshed occasionally, giving you more time to run like hell and less time spent in a vulnerable casting position.
2) Ranged attackers/vortex/mortar: You will be very far away from them, waiting for them to die, for the duration of the encounter. You will constantly be laying slows between you and them, and since there are no long casting animations, you can manually dodge most ranged attacks. You do have to get close for locusts, but again, you'll be invincible.
3) Fast mobs: These are why you have both zombie wall and grasp in your arsenal. The WD doesn't often get enough credit for having two extremely powerful CC moves. However, grasp slows 80% and wall does 60%. Even with the inferno 'slow reduction,' casting both of these at the same time will seriously impede movement, even of a fast elite. Also grasp has a very short cooldown, so you can have one of those between you and your enemies almost all the time.
4) Life: Runed as it is, this build includes life regen from both siphon and haunt, damage reduction from jungle fort, and an emergency cooldown in the form of spirit vessel. If you're not having mana problems, you could re-rune spirit walk to Healing Journey and gain even more health. Also, I don't know the exact mechanic, but I believe that dot spells do work with life-on-hit items to return life per tick, so if you have life-on-hit gear, you may be getting a decent amount of life by just doing damage from locust and haunt.
By the way, I know someone is going to bring this up, but I honestly have not hit an enrage timer for the duration I've been using this build. I'm just as surprised as you are.
Thanks for your attention. Hope this helped someone. If you try this build, let me know how it goes for you. I welcome input/criticism.
Interesting build. Seems like it may be fun if you wanted a change of pace, but honestly, just farm ACT I until you get about a million gold, and it's pretty easy to get above 25k DPS, especially if your using Pierce the Veil. Depending on your play time farming ACT I inferno can yield a million gold pretty easily in just a few days. I think I've only spent about 1.5 million on my WD's gear, and he's not amazing but he has about 30k DPS.
But I will say that I like that you've found a build that compensates for your weaknesses. Too many people are stuck trying to follow the rest of the crowd with their builds, and either not having fun, or complaining about a lack of build diversity. There are a lot of viable build if you properly gear for them, and play them correctly. So props for that.
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Act 2 inferno crushed me because of having such low dps (16k dps, 38k life, 3.4k armor). Basically I just made extremely poor gear choices (no crit, more vit than int, etc.). I died so much I was down to ~100k gold due to repair bills, every elite mob pack was pretty much ruining my day several times over before I could down them, if I could at all. I was using a pretty standard Vision Quest build and getting wrecked.
So I started to dick around with my build a bit to try to mitigate the suck and ended up trying a DOT-based build I'd liked on nightmare. To my surprise, within about half an hour I had five stacks of neph valor and had only died once. Huge change. I noticed in the big DPS thread that others were having a similar issue, so here's my solution:
Link to the build here.
Notes:
1) Runes matter. Please check out the whole build rather than just the tooltip.
2) This build depends wholly on kiting. You need increased runspeed on your boots for it to work.
3) This is not boss viable. Great for elite farming, though.
4) Mess with the passives as you see fit. I have little mana regen, so I have to VQ. You may not need to.
5) Set up a force run key binding and use it.
6) Recommended rotation: Pop spirit walk, run into a mob group, locust swarm and siphon, then run out. Cast Grasp and Zombie Wall between you and them. If they're normal mobs, they should melt away in a few ticks. If they're elites or high health, dot each elite individually with haunt. At this point you will want to put as much distance between you and the mobs as possible. Keep kiting and applying Wall/Grasp as needed to slow. Reapply Haunt when it falls off. Reapply locust when your Spirit Walk cooldown is up by spirit walking, running up the mobs, locust (and siphon if needed), and running off.
Breakdown:
On first glance this build looks pretty gimp. And it is. If you have decent dps (above 25k), don't bother with it. However, for those of us who are struggling just to live, this build addresses a lot of common problems.
1) Mobility = Survivability: One of the main problems I was having with my standard VQ build is that when I stood still to cast stuff, I'd get murderated. The WD has notoriously long casting animations. However, haunt does not. You can essentially cast haunt over your shoulder with no IAS and still dodge stuff. It also has a massive range compared to other WD abilities and will seek out its designated target. Locust does have a long casting animation, but this is taken care of because you will be in spirit walk when you are casting it. Also, haunt only has to be refreshed occasionally, giving you more time to run like hell and less time spent in a vulnerable casting position.
2) Ranged attackers/vortex/mortar: You will be very far away from them, waiting for them to die, for the duration of the encounter. You will constantly be laying slows between you and them, and since there are no long casting animations, you can manually dodge most ranged attacks. You do have to get close for locusts, but again, you'll be invincible.
3) Fast mobs: These are why you have both zombie wall and grasp in your arsenal. The WD doesn't often get enough credit for having two extremely powerful CC moves. However, grasp slows 80% and wall does 60%. Even with the inferno 'slow reduction,' casting both of these at the same time will seriously impede movement, even of a fast elite. Also grasp has a very short cooldown, so you can have one of those between you and your enemies almost all the time.
4) Life: Runed as it is, this build includes life regen from both siphon and haunt, damage reduction from jungle fort, and an emergency cooldown in the form of spirit vessel. If you're not having mana problems, you could re-rune spirit walk to Healing Journey and gain even more health. Also, I don't know the exact mechanic, but I believe that dot spells do work with life-on-hit items to return life per tick, so if you have life-on-hit gear, you may be getting a decent amount of life by just doing damage from locust and haunt.
By the way, I know someone is going to bring this up, but I honestly have not hit an enrage timer for the duration I've been using this build. I'm just as surprised as you are.
Thanks for your attention. Hope this helped someone. If you try this build, let me know how it goes for you. I welcome input/criticism.
But I will say that I like that you've found a build that compensates for your weaknesses. Too many people are stuck trying to follow the rest of the crowd with their builds, and either not having fun, or complaining about a lack of build diversity. There are a lot of viable build if you properly gear for them, and play them correctly. So props for that.
Tired of the same regurgitated blue posts? Want more in depth coverage of
the aspects of the game you want to know about? Check us out!