There was a thread on this forum recently saying that strongarm is not working with pirhanado, so idk.
Snapshot means: a dot stays the same strength as when it was cast, despite temporary buffs fading or being gained. Get a +400% damage pylon (or a lord harrington's belt proc) and cast locusts, and they will stay +400% damage even when the buff fades.
Since either all dot ticks are a crit, or all not a crit, you can also cast a dot until it turns into a crit (afterward leave it alone to crit tick).
So after my comment a couple days ago I set to get the craftables I needed, since I already had my 20% cold ammy, I managed to put the set together witch 35% cold and an extra 23% to haunt and started trying the build with progressive difficulty scaling, I must say it's an awesome build, it delivers as you would expect, I ended up with only 600k sheet dps, wich comes up to 850k while ingame, but with that I was able to clear a T6 rift in 35 mins, so I'm gonna keep using it for a long time (until I find either zuni's or jade's set to toy with).
I did made a few changes while scaling the diff, I'm also using frozen piranhas to get a little bonus fro cold% and I usually set them on the floor and lay 3 phantasms and everything kinda stucks there, because of the shorter cd of frozen piranhas I removed Grave Injustice and got Gruesome Feast in, just to get a bit more dmg in. As for actives I realized it strongly depends on diff level, up until T5 I was using Soul Harvest and Mass Confusion in place of Horrify and Spirit Walk, since in T4, if I got cornered, I could always kill something and make a hole before I died, at that point I switched to Spirit Walk (Healing Journey) and Zombie Dogs (Life Link), since dmg on T5 and T6 gets awfully bursty for your dogs and I'd rather have a way to bringing them up immediatly, plus the life link helps a lot.
That said, grats on an awesome guide for an awesome build, keep it up =)
Trompu! I really appreciate your comment, and l-o-v-e hearing alternative setups. I'm very busy with IRL atm and it's hard to find the hours to sit down and play with math (eg I want to do an "all spec, all math"comparison using the real mechanics and scaling that blizz doesn't mention on some things). I will give a try to frozen pirhanas again when soloing.
I shift that passive slot around too, I just dislike how fast gruesome dissipates and how its highest stacks tend to happen after 70% of the monsters are dead... I think it's also that it makes me feel a little frantic to get health globes (which can lead to a lot of unnecessary running around, or having to dodge more due to having less mitigation (yay GI lowering horrify/spirit walk). I have a similar beef with soul harvest (meh buff, meh used as damage, often makes you run into melee then maybe back out, meh).
Taking another dps talent for easy difficulty is great. And yeah, T5+ is brutal on the dogs and I find I have to just leave in circle of life passive at times on T6 if using ukhapian serpent. I find horrify's pre-cast 60% toughness too useful to part with though as it really prevents insta gibs for me. I have had wild thoughts of trying to make a passable Tall man's fingerbone ring and use circle of life to get a mega zombie dog (then remove the passive after it's summoned), but other rings are too good. For anyone who doesn't know, the mega zombie dog has around 1.6million health compared to the 60k of regular dogs.
Please post in if you find any more feedback or ways you would improve or change all this.
just wanted so say thanks for posting this build. It reinvigorated my motivation for WD again. i went from t1 to 3 after i changed to this build. and the playstyle suits me much more than my previous one. A suggestion could be that you add a bit more details about playstyle and skill rotation when in combat.
I might give that setup a go, getting dogs just from Circle of Life and putting Horrify on my actives but the thing so far is that I've found I don't die often enough to feel that it's necessary, on the other hand there aren't that many dmg increasing skills to pick from so it's just a matter of testing, I honestly don't like Soul Harvest either, I was using it for that same reason, I couldn't find another skill that would actually help me kill stuff faster since survivality was not an issue.
Thx for the feedback and I'll try to keep coming back with my own experiences.
Mainly I'm happy that some people are going up a torment or two and having same/better speed, changing from the more traditional pet setups.
This is not meant to be one of those "Hey if you have ALL PERFECT ITEMS you can farm T6" kind of "guides". It's more about an overall extremely good setup that is more accessible to most players before they get all the perfect items. Though this is an excellent way pre-jade harvester setup. But farming T5 will probably never be super fast in any gear setup without special legendaries and 4sets. If you're gambling go for some of the useful items listed in the opening post and/or a stone of jordan ring.
For me T4 is an awesome difficulty, stuff goes down pretty fast and I can run it while watching TV, I usually get the dogs out (pun intended) and switch to gruesome feast for dps whoring and press my Soul Harvest button whenever I remember to. I can do T5 "efficientish" but for that I don't switch the passive since the dogs die quite often and I try to always keep an eye on Soul Harvest buff. I still can't get to like Horrify, since I'm not in danger of dying that often and I prefer a button a hardly press cause I forget rather than one I hardly press because it gets way too niche for my playstyle, I do reccomend though that your properly gear your Templar and take him with you, he can be a life saver from time to time.
What I do consider important to improve farming speed is the bonus dmg stacking, I got +39% cold, +35% elite and +23% haunt, alltogether comes out to some nice dmg output on elites and rift bosses. But don't freak out if you got low sheet dmg, as you can see in my profile, I got 575k wich doesn't sound that great but if you think about it, Quetzalcoatl "doubles" your dmg output.
On some final words, I really like the fact that the build is the fact that the only "luck" you need to get it going is find your Quetzalcoatl (I don't see it working without it, since everything would take twice the time and that sound terrible), but other than that you just craft 5 items and start your monster slaying session. As for what to look from Kadala I would say:
Hwoj Belt
Stone of Jordan ring
Tall Man´s Finger ring
Sun Keeper mace (for elite dmg)
Uhkapian Serpent mojo (awesome item in general)
I think that should burn a couple thousand shards so good luck
Hi! I'm trying the build with my new Witch Doctor, I'm not very experiencied, that's the first time I'm playing with that class, but I can say that I'm enjoying it, did T4 rifts without much problem, my dots are ticking 7m~14m and I don't even have the Quetzalcoatl yet! (been trying on Kadala, but got only others leg WD helm) I'm using andariels with cold dmg atm, hoping for one Quetz drop... Also my Mojo is just a random yellow drop I got yet, I can probably goes very further when I find the helm and a good mojo!
My profile: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/TheOni-1389/hero/47384395
Atm I don't have any Haunt or other skill modifiers, I'll be trying to improve those atributes.
Can you explain me how Uhkapian Serpent mojo works for this build?
Jem I added a little about opener - mainly that pirhanas should be first otherwise dots do not update with the 15% damage unless recast.
Oni: uhkapian mojo is mainly there because it gives you incredible mitigation of 25-30% of damage you take being instead sent to your dogs. If you don't need the mitigation there are other nice mojo.
PS: I played with my strongarm bracers more and I find them very underwhelming and hard to test with the pieces I have available. I am certain that they do -not- snapshot the damage bonus on dots. Over and over I pirhanado a single monster then applied locusts (or haunt in separate tests), since dots show a single non changing number. Never did the debuff snapshot on them, if it's even working. So if it works, it's just that 5s immediately after the first pull in. You're better off having a wizard friend around who runs elemental exposure, cold blooded, and conflagration.. since they seem to be party wide from what we can discover online or observe.
Other nice tip: there is that community button in-game. There is a large witch doctor community channel that often has several hundred players online, and they are constantly running rifts. The idea is that hopefully people will trade legendaries they don't need, but that you need (trading them a crappy legendary that dropped which you would otherwise destroy). You can trade legendaries for up to 2hrs after they drop, but only to the people who were in party with you when it dropped.
Lastly, I didn't mention Proc-coefficients in the main post in detail and will probably leave it out. But for those who wanted to know what that is -- basically all spells have a modifier that is applied to every proc in this game: life on hit, "chance to cast lightning bolt on hit", and something like wizard magic weapon-ignite (chance to set on fire). Basically slow single target spells have a 100% coefficient (like haunt) and would give you 100% of your life on hit (or always proc magicweapon ignite), or give you the real 30% chance per attack to proc an odyn's son.
But most aoe spells have lower coefficients like 33% chance (or lower). But if you're hitting x3 monsters with them you would get your full life on hit, otherwise one target would give 33% of it. Similarly an odyn's son with 30% proc chance might actually have around 10% proc chance when used on an aoe spell with a 33% modifier.
There are charts of the coefficients floating around these forums in the theorycrafting sections.
While looking for a build to use while farming zunis/jades/pet build stuff, came across this, been running this for a week and here's my thoughts.
The damage output (if geared) of this build is *insane*, mind you, I really am nearly BiS gear for this build, but I can farm T6 all day long, without dying, even getting shitty rifts (death maidens, anarchs, incinerators, winged assassins, I hate you all) and still np!
This build truly shows that tooltip dps doesn't say jack shit, I got a 1.9 million tooltip archon wizard, that has more stationary dps output, but because I have to kite everything and half the time have no dps uptime, it drops down alot, and more importantly, there's no way on earth you can reliably farm T6 (solo) as arcane wizard, unless you have all RNG gods at your side and are running vyrs+tals 4 set. This build, well I would say that the quetzcoatl and thunderfury are fairly mandatory, but 2 items! and no set items at that. Spend some shards on Kadala, not hard to get this build working.
I got the serpent OH, but I dont like wasting time running CoL to get dogs, and on top of that, it forces me to run dogs as a permaskill as they simply do not survive on T6 - and I actually like running horrify, that armor is delicious. With paragon in armor and horrify having pretty much 100% uptime I am sitting on 13k armor - that with aughilds/bt and string of ears mitigation, well the dangerous melee hitters in t6 are barely hitting me for 100k, easymode!
Instead of running the serpent OH I went with Thing of the Deep, and I can say that the 20y pickup radius on it coupled with grave injustice is simply amazing. Anything on my screen dies? -1 sec cd. Any healthglobe on my screen? take ONE step, pick it up. I would recommend this OH over serpent any time of the day.
For group rifting I switch horrify to slam dance - with GI and the OH my slam dance cooldown is nonexistant, its up every pack, and because it is, every group will want you, you will bring 45% damage modifer (slam dance/piranha) with pretty much permanent uptime, which other class can say the same?
Thanks to this build I ditched my wizard and play WD nonstop now, and then to think I shelved this character on vanilla d3 / prenerf inferno after hitting that brick wall called act 2, and never touched it again since last week... because some pet WD inspired me to try it out... well fuck pets, and fuck pet AI, dots is where its at
Wow congrats, and thank you so much for the feedback and ideas.
You have a mighty good point about that offhand and dogs for T6. And you also make me wish I could get some more pieces to finally roll +cold, I may do as you're doing and look for some decent yellow in the meantime.
Jem I added a little about opener - mainly that pirhanas should be first otherwise dots do not update with the 15% damage unless recast.
Oni: uhkapian mojo is mainly there because it gives you incredible mitigation of 25-30% of damage you take being instead sent to your dogs. If you don't need the mitigation there are other nice mojo.
Yea, but what I mean, is that build isn't using dogs as pets... or that doesn't matter and mitigate anyway? I don't see a place for dogs, maybe on horrify place?
I'll try to make it more obvious in the opening post. You are not the first person to ask this in the thread - there is helpful stuff if you read through people's comments they talk about what they've tried and what works for them.
"4th passive is optional - I often use circle of life to get 3 dogs then change it to either grave injustice, jungle fortitude, or bad medicine (for groups) The dogs do not despawn when the talent is changed." you do need dogs for the offhand to work.
Haha yeah I have been unable to find any decent legendary +cold neck between both my wiz and wd. I got every other element type, just no cold.
If I had a choice what neck to put in there, it would probably be the lightning or cold prevent neck - if anything can still kill me, it's thunderstorm/electrified/frozen pulse
Just leveled up two WD's over the weekend (multibox) - and actually had quite a few +cold pieces sitting around on my main account from my very brief frozen orb days - glad I kept them! Profile link for "main" account here:http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Bmf-1293/hero/887659
Have looked into WD's and saw the pet builds as very popular, but have played w/ some guildies running the spec - and while it does kill things very fast - not the spec for me. DOT's bring back good memories of my affliction lock and shadow priest :).
Tried this build out - slightly modified (although to be modified again after reading through this thread) and all I can say is that I love it! If only rifts this weekend actually dropped something (so much crap loot....nothing useful - QQQQ but I digress).
Definitely want to replace my pants, leoric's ring (although I have a nice RoRG on my wiz I could use), gloves, chest, and shoulders. Should be noted my boots I use are on my wiz atm (swap em between the toons - ice climbers). Been trying to get a Quetz helm too, but kadala is a stingy sob (~2,000 shards and like 3 helms total - none being voodoo mask variety). Going to be working in Aughild's set (likely chest/shoulders), and unsure which pants I want to use (may just use the Pox from my wiz).
Can't get a link to my multibox profile atm, but gear level is a bit lower - but still quite decent.
For some reason I didn't realize Haunt and Locust Swarm last as long as they do - so I have been ruining some nice snapshot damage from my DOT's - which will make this build all the more fun/efficient. Only been rifting on T3, but definitely plan to step up to T4/T5 within a few days if not sooner. Definitely going to swap out the voodoo - just dislike fears, but can't argue with the huge toughness gains from it. Overall - thanks for the spec - it is quite awesome! Definitely a good break from my Wand of Woh wiz (aka wand of carpal tunnel). Cheers!
TBH I want to say yes on the Ashera's. In multi player the pet buffs+damage are probably semi equal to the elite damage on blackthorne, plus they distract enemies. The 20% and 100resist are nice. Moreso you could have boots with up to +15% spirit barrage, and chest can have up to +15% haunt on it, currently I don't think your blackthorne can be enchanted into this =|.
I love the idea of 4set blackthorne, but it's hard to get great blackthorne pieces due to them rolling with so many pre-determined stats like life per second.
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Snapshot means: a dot stays the same strength as when it was cast, despite temporary buffs fading or being gained. Get a +400% damage pylon (or a lord harrington's belt proc) and cast locusts, and they will stay +400% damage even when the buff fades.
Since either all dot ticks are a crit, or all not a crit, you can also cast a dot until it turns into a crit (afterward leave it alone to crit tick).
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/12673547734
http://www.diablofans.com/forums/diablo-iii-class-forums/witch-doctor-the-mbwiru-eikura/86850-psa-pirhanado-does-not-proc-strongarm-bracers
I did made a few changes while scaling the diff, I'm also using frozen piranhas to get a little bonus fro cold% and I usually set them on the floor and lay 3 phantasms and everything kinda stucks there, because of the shorter cd of frozen piranhas I removed Grave Injustice and got Gruesome Feast in, just to get a bit more dmg in. As for actives I realized it strongly depends on diff level, up until T5 I was using Soul Harvest and Mass Confusion in place of Horrify and Spirit Walk, since in T4, if I got cornered, I could always kill something and make a hole before I died, at that point I switched to Spirit Walk (Healing Journey) and Zombie Dogs (Life Link), since dmg on T5 and T6 gets awfully bursty for your dogs and I'd rather have a way to bringing them up immediatly, plus the life link helps a lot.
That said, grats on an awesome guide for an awesome build, keep it up =)
I shift that passive slot around too, I just dislike how fast gruesome dissipates and how its highest stacks tend to happen after 70% of the monsters are dead... I think it's also that it makes me feel a little frantic to get health globes (which can lead to a lot of unnecessary running around, or having to dodge more due to having less mitigation (yay GI lowering horrify/spirit walk). I have a similar beef with soul harvest (meh buff, meh used as damage, often makes you run into melee then maybe back out, meh).
Taking another dps talent for easy difficulty is great. And yeah, T5+ is brutal on the dogs and I find I have to just leave in circle of life passive at times on T6 if using ukhapian serpent. I find horrify's pre-cast 60% toughness too useful to part with though as it really prevents insta gibs for me. I have had wild thoughts of trying to make a passable Tall man's fingerbone ring and use circle of life to get a mega zombie dog (then remove the passive after it's summoned), but other rings are too good. For anyone who doesn't know, the mega zombie dog has around 1.6million health compared to the 60k of regular dogs.
Please post in if you find any more feedback or ways you would improve or change all this.
anyway thanks again
Thx for the feedback and I'll try to keep coming back with my own experiences.
This is not meant to be one of those "Hey if you have ALL PERFECT ITEMS you can farm T6" kind of "guides". It's more about an overall extremely good setup that is more accessible to most players before they get all the perfect items. Though this is an excellent way pre-jade harvester setup.
But farming T5 will probably never be super fast in any gear setup without special legendaries and 4sets. If you're gambling go for some of the useful items listed in the opening post and/or a stone of jordan ring.
For me T4 is an awesome difficulty, stuff goes down pretty fast and I can run it while watching TV, I usually get the dogs out (pun intended) and switch to gruesome feast for dps whoring and press my Soul Harvest button whenever I remember to. I can do T5 "efficientish" but for that I don't switch the passive since the dogs die quite often and I try to always keep an eye on Soul Harvest buff. I still can't get to like Horrify, since I'm not in danger of dying that often and I prefer a button a hardly press cause I forget rather than one I hardly press because it gets way too niche for my playstyle, I do reccomend though that your properly gear your Templar and take him with you, he can be a life saver from time to time.
What I do consider important to improve farming speed is the bonus dmg stacking, I got +39% cold, +35% elite and +23% haunt, alltogether comes out to some nice dmg output on elites and rift bosses. But don't freak out if you got low sheet dmg, as you can see in my profile, I got 575k wich doesn't sound that great but if you think about it, Quetzalcoatl "doubles" your dmg output.
On some final words, I really like the fact that the build is the fact that the only "luck" you need to get it going is find your Quetzalcoatl (I don't see it working without it, since everything would take twice the time and that sound terrible), but other than that you just craft 5 items and start your monster slaying session. As for what to look from Kadala I would say:
Once again, kudos Justusy!
My profile: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/TheOni-1389/hero/47384395
Atm I don't have any Haunt or other skill modifiers, I'll be trying to improve those atributes.
Can you explain me how Uhkapian Serpent mojo works for this build?
Oni: uhkapian mojo is mainly there because it gives you incredible mitigation of 25-30% of damage you take being instead sent to your dogs. If you don't need the mitigation there are other nice mojo.
Other nice tip: there is that community button in-game. There is a large witch doctor community channel that often has several hundred players online, and they are constantly running rifts. The idea is that hopefully people will trade legendaries they don't need, but that you need (trading them a crappy legendary that dropped which you would otherwise destroy). You can trade legendaries for up to 2hrs after they drop, but only to the people who were in party with you when it dropped.
Lastly, I didn't mention Proc-coefficients in the main post in detail and will probably leave it out. But for those who wanted to know what that is -- basically all spells have a modifier that is applied to every proc in this game: life on hit, "chance to cast lightning bolt on hit", and something like wizard magic weapon-ignite (chance to set on fire). Basically slow single target spells have a 100% coefficient (like haunt) and would give you 100% of your life on hit (or always proc magicweapon ignite), or give you the real 30% chance per attack to proc an odyn's son.
But most aoe spells have lower coefficients like 33% chance (or lower). But if you're hitting x3 monsters with them you would get your full life on hit, otherwise one target would give 33% of it. Similarly an odyn's son with 30% proc chance might actually have around 10% proc chance when used on an aoe spell with a 33% modifier.
There are charts of the coefficients floating around these forums in the theorycrafting sections.
The damage output (if geared) of this build is *insane*, mind you, I really am nearly BiS gear for this build, but I can farm T6 all day long, without dying, even getting shitty rifts (death maidens, anarchs, incinerators, winged assassins, I hate you all) and still np!
This build truly shows that tooltip dps doesn't say jack shit, I got a 1.9 million tooltip archon wizard, that has more stationary dps output, but because I have to kite everything and half the time have no dps uptime, it drops down alot, and more importantly, there's no way on earth you can reliably farm T6 (solo) as arcane wizard, unless you have all RNG gods at your side and are running vyrs+tals 4 set. This build, well I would say that the quetzcoatl and thunderfury are fairly mandatory, but 2 items! and no set items at that. Spend some shards on Kadala, not hard to get this build working.
I got the serpent OH, but I dont like wasting time running CoL to get dogs, and on top of that, it forces me to run dogs as a permaskill as they simply do not survive on T6 - and I actually like running horrify, that armor is delicious. With paragon in armor and horrify having pretty much 100% uptime I am sitting on 13k armor - that with aughilds/bt and string of ears mitigation, well the dangerous melee hitters in t6 are barely hitting me for 100k, easymode!
Instead of running the serpent OH I went with Thing of the Deep, and I can say that the 20y pickup radius on it coupled with grave injustice is simply amazing. Anything on my screen dies? -1 sec cd. Any healthglobe on my screen? take ONE step, pick it up. I would recommend this OH over serpent any time of the day.
For group rifting I switch horrify to slam dance - with GI and the OH my slam dance cooldown is nonexistant, its up every pack, and because it is, every group will want you, you will bring 45% damage modifer (slam dance/piranha) with pretty much permanent uptime, which other class can say the same?
Thanks to this build I ditched my wizard and play WD nonstop now, and then to think I shelved this character on vanilla d3 / prenerf inferno after hitting that brick wall called act 2, and never touched it again since last week... because some pet WD inspired me to try it out... well fuck pets, and fuck pet AI, dots is where its at
My profile incase anyone would be interested:http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Falagar-2513/hero/35539918
You have a mighty good point about that offhand and dogs for T6. And you also make me wish I could get some more pieces to finally roll +cold, I may do as you're doing and look for some decent yellow in the meantime.
"4th passive is optional - I often use circle of life to get 3 dogs then change it to either grave injustice, jungle fortitude, or bad medicine (for groups) The dogs do not despawn when the talent is changed." you do need dogs for the offhand to work.
If I had a choice what neck to put in there, it would probably be the lightning or cold prevent neck - if anything can still kill me, it's thunderstorm/electrified/frozen pulse
Have looked into WD's and saw the pet builds as very popular, but have played w/ some guildies running the spec - and while it does kill things very fast - not the spec for me. DOT's bring back good memories of my affliction lock and shadow priest :).
Tried this build out - slightly modified (although to be modified again after reading through this thread) and all I can say is that I love it! If only rifts this weekend actually dropped something (so much crap loot....nothing useful - QQQQ but I digress).
Definitely want to replace my pants, leoric's ring (although I have a nice RoRG on my wiz I could use), gloves, chest, and shoulders. Should be noted my boots I use are on my wiz atm (swap em between the toons - ice climbers). Been trying to get a Quetz helm too, but kadala is a stingy sob (~2,000 shards and like 3 helms total - none being voodoo mask variety). Going to be working in Aughild's set (likely chest/shoulders), and unsure which pants I want to use (may just use the Pox from my wiz).
Can't get a link to my multibox profile atm, but gear level is a bit lower - but still quite decent.
For some reason I didn't realize Haunt and Locust Swarm last as long as they do - so I have been ruining some nice snapshot damage from my DOT's - which will make this build all the more fun/efficient. Only been rifting on T3, but definitely plan to step up to T4/T5 within a few days if not sooner. Definitely going to swap out the voodoo - just dislike fears, but can't argue with the huge toughness gains from it. Overall - thanks for the spec - it is quite awesome! Definitely a good break from my Wand of Woh wiz (aka wand of carpal tunnel). Cheers!
My profile: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/TheOni-1389/hero/47384395
Well I'm using 4 pc (3 with ring) blackthorn, but Is it worth change it for Asheara's set? (Gloves, Pants and Boots).
Ps: Still didn't have luck on Quetz helm
TBH I want to say yes on the Ashera's. In multi player the pet buffs+damage are probably semi equal to the elite damage on blackthorne, plus they distract enemies. The 20% and 100resist are nice. Moreso you could have boots with up to +15% spirit barrage, and chest can have up to +15% haunt on it, currently I don't think your blackthorne can be enchanted into this =|.
I love the idea of 4set blackthorne, but it's hard to get great blackthorne pieces due to them rolling with so many pre-determined stats like life per second.