I've gotten Ukhapian Serpent, Hwoj Wrap and Jaren. I have a lack of fire dmg so I'm using a mix of Physical and Poison % increases. I really like the idea of going really tank instead of glass cannonespeciallywhen going into T2+. All other builds rely on the used of Spirit Walk and Vessel to keep you up in T2+ and I'm pretty sick of playing that way.
My problem with the build is when I'm sometimes grouped up with my monk friend who is really tank. I feel pretty useless at that point. When he leaves though all my other friend who are all dps complain hard when I afk because minibosses wreck them. It's nice that the new meta game practically requires someone to be the beefy guy and take the mobs attention past T2.
Is there a certain weapon to shoot for on this build? I'm using a crappy thing right now.
This build works great been using it for farming Siegebreaker for a few weeks. Really the only thing the build requires (IMO) is a decent one handed weapon. Even then you can totally get by with a slow two hander, but once you hit Act 3 range mobs start becoming a large headache.
If possible I recommend people moving into A2-A3 inferno with this build have at least a 850 DPS 1 hander with as much BASE (not with a tacked on IAS modifier) speed as possible. A one-handed sword, dagger or ceremonial dagger with a socket for a big emerald (if possible) paired with a snake offhand with as high damage as you can find. The highest damage offhands I have found have been the snakes with ~100 min dmg and ~375-390 max damage. The offhands are really cheap and VERY good. You can find really good blue offhands with 100-385dmg with 8% crit or INT for less then 100K easily.
EDIT:
Regarding reflect damage bosses they can be easily countered by kiting to a Health Fountain. Between kiting, pots, hex heal and a heal fountain they are fairly simple to take down. You just have to take them slower then normal. Act 3 Always seems to have at least 2 fountains. One to the top and one to the bottom of the map.
As much as I love people sharing their input on builds I'm sick of seeing Splinter and bear builds. I've been running Direbats recently and it is way more fun then Splinters. With the large IAS nerf I think Splinters will become less popular so might as well look into other builds that perform better with slower attack speed.
The large benefit of Direbats so far that I have seen is it allows you to kill boss packs that are virtually impossible with splinters without zerging down a boss. Most notably immune minions and reflect damage! Also kiting boss packs is much more easier with direbats. The range and width of the bat allows very simple hit and run casting that splinters actually feels clunky doing. Bats also have a slow travel time. This is actually a benefit because while kiting mobs will run into the bat keeping you at a far distance while still doing good damage. Not to mention if you get good at positioning you can be damaging an entire group of bosses at once instead of one at a time.
The build has it's downside no doubt. It's mana intensive and you pretty much are forced into Vision Quest. I don't really consider this a downside though as long as you have space to put in Spirit Vessel the other two perks really are up for debate. The only other issue with the build is damage consistency in co-op games. When HP skyrockets the bats become less useful and you end up standing around waiting a few seconds per bat cast when you get low.
I think Direbats are getting a bad rap. People think you need to be a heavy cooldown build to use the builds and that is totally false. I run a similar build to the OP except I swapped Splinters for Direbats and Pierce the Veil for Vision Quest and it functions great. I love the build for farming solo it really is fun. Depending on my setting (single or co-op) I swap Army for Totem.
I've been toying around with this build in general after it was initially posted.
First I took the OPs approach and stacked very high crit modifiers both crit chance and critical damage where ever I could without a huge hit to int. The build was very fun with direbats and absolutely hilarious with Zombie wall (Pile On).
My character sheet (estimated):
30-33k damage
30% crit
209% crit damage
Direbats were critting for 150K+ virtually. The really fun thing though was Pile On it was criting for 500K and I saw as high as 750K. This skill alone totally obliterated boss packs (minus reflect damage as it would one shot me).
The problem with the build however is it sacrificed almost all my ias. My two handed weapon was staple to getting such a high crit modifier but it was slow and I was a sitting duck for range mobs. This became a huge issue for where I'm farming now... Siegebreaker.
I decided to swap out the (1k dps) two hander with over 100% crit bonus to a blue 1k dps one hander with a 300ish dmg offhand. The result is less then stunning crits but it allows me to control space better leading me to survive easier. Right now I'm running with the cookie cutter splinter build with Direbats instead of splinters and Vision Quest. The build is very good for farming. Some stated having issues over splinters, but I think splinters sucks because of it's single target nature. Face it minibosses are tough no matter your spec but direbats let me blow up entire rooms of guys almost instantly something that would take forever on a splinters build. Just last night I had a 56 kill streak on the bridge after a few casts.
Does the build have a downside? Yes your skill is by no means spammable like splinters and to get vision quest going requires skills on cooldown, but once you get to act3 or 4 you will be constantly having your utility skills on cooldown with spirit walk as backup. I love the build for farming.
Why do I not see WD using Locust Swarm? I am only in Hell Act III so things may change in Inferno but I absolutely LOVE Locust Swarm.
It's usable and actually fairly good once you get used to using it. The problem with it isn't the range it's and the DoT nature of damage. I could cast one firebat and it does immediate damage to tons of mobs or I could cast Swarm and pray it jumps to additional mobs. It's a clunky spell on how it jumps that makes it frustrating to use. I'd rather use zombie wall. It's damage in AOE is actually really good and it has the bonus of holding mobs for me to direbat them more.
This said I've seen doctors using swarm in inferno. It's definitely not a unused skill it just isn't for me. When I cast a spell I need instant results not 8 seconds of results because the longer mobs are alive the longer I'm at risk of getting 1 shot.
If that's the case you can easily socket a weapon with a Emerald for 50% and you would already be doing double dmg. If you get really lucky and have a rare with passive +dmg, socket and crit bonus damage this could easily sky rocket. I've also seen gloves with high crit % and crit damage increase. I'm unsure if 300% is easily obtainable though.... I haven't paid too much attention to armors with it.
How is the crit modifier on items calculated (additive or multiplicative?) and what is the base crit bonus (50% or 100%)?
I did some quick math on dart choice and Spinters still seems like the best bet over Flame Dart for this type of build. Even with the mega critical bonus Flame Dart lags behind. This is assuming every third shot is a crit obviously this is just an average. Quick math if you have 35k dmg, 30% crit and 300% critical dmg...
Since Splinters came in on top this got me thinking... I bet a WD gearing for this way may cause both AoE abilities and fast hitting abilities produce more overall dmgthen with IAS. Think about it. IAS is great on spammed abilities like darts, flame bomb, etc but its terrible for our expensive spells like Acid Cloud. Corpse bomb alone would crit for 210,000 in AoE. Im also thinking about Jumping Spiders. They have been considered crap, but If you can get high enough crit bonus they may easily pull a head of most spamabble skills because they would crit the most out of any ability though this is hard to theorycraft. I think the build is worth looking into. I wouldn't go so far as to abandon a good 1 hander for a 2 hander (unless its a damage increase) as some IAS is always beneficial!
That said I think insane amounts of IAS will still be better then an insane amounts of critical dmg when it comes to large targets like bosses, but for farming hordes of mobs or co-op play a critical based build may be better.
I'm interested in this as well. I finally got past Belial last night and the amount of mobs in act 3 really seem to favor a VQ build, but it just wasn't working out for me. I tried out rain of toads (not enough damage), ghost bomb (not too bad), bears (random fireballs kept sniping me) and dire bats (was having mana issues then zerged). I really don't want to go thru this act with Splinters, but it might be the only way :/
I've been looking into the use of Locust Swarm in Inferno. The damage it can output is staggering. It's weakness lies in the delivery which can be easily handled with the use of skills like Zombie Wall, Spirit Walk, Hex, etc or playing Co-op.
Just a quick napkin math example:
Lets assume a pack of 5 zombies on act 1 inferno... Not calculating resists or any of that just base everything. My WD has around 16k damage unbuffed. I'm assuming use of Searing Locusts.
((448%) * 16000)) * 5 = 358,400 damage. From my experience it takes the swarm around one second before it jumps so assuming the first zombie is hit instantly this amount of damage would take 12 full seconds before it has fully spread and run its damage to the pack.
358400 / (60% * 16000) = 37.3 / 3 = 12.4 casts of splinters or 37.3 splinter darts.
For some more numbers Locusts Swarm does the same damage (well within 2%) that each splinter bolt does per second to all mobs affected. Basically if you come up to a pack cast locust swarm every mob with bugs is taking 58.5% weapon damage per second.
That said Haunt is also very attractive. Same scenario with 5 zombies. You can only Haunt three mobs at a time. I'm assuming Grasping Spirit.
((575%) * 16,000)) * 3 = 276,000
Unlike Locusts Haunt does 48% weapon damage per second. If you think about this in terms of casts Haunt isn't that attractive, but do not forget Locusts require positioning while Haunt can be cast from anywhere therefore I de-deuce the time wasted casting haunt three times is also wasted by getting close to a mob and casting Locusts.
These two skills are underrated in inferno and I don't understand it because they are both better to cast over splinters. Hell Haunt alone can be cast from the same range as splinters! Shooting an elite with Haunt that you otherwise would have shot with Splinters is like hitting that mob three times with Splinters! As anyone who in inferno knows while kiting an elite pack casting Splinters three times back to back doesn't happen often.
I'm curious. How are you staying alive without Spirit Vessel? Is your uptime on fetishes and dogs high enough to be a distraction to make your survival better? Thanks
This is not true a Korean player soloed all of Inferno with a Barbarian. My friend who plays a barb was talking about him yesterday along with his build. It sounded like pretty open knowledge.
Outside of "must have" skills like my invaluable spirit walk I don't see much problem with the game. The issue is that Barbarian is designed from the ground up to have a ton of hit points and leech ability yet when they go into melee they are paper. This is a problem. Witch Doctor is the same deal though. We can only effectively achieve high DPS by using the extremely good perk Vision Quest because our mana resource is just not sustainable when using our better skills. However, I do honestly believe when time is invested and good coordination is there Inferno can be enjoyable. I think people are hitting 60 getting super happy and also get the loot buff then they get stopped dead in their tracks after Hell.
This said I really hope many runes get needed buffs to allow more character diversity. I feel that they need to take notes on why WD's are favoring Dire Bats, Zombie Bears and Splinters so much over other skills. Nerfs are something I wasn't expecting but to be quite honest DH's were just out of line though. They could stay invulnerable almost indefinitely and that is a game breaking issue. I think right now Blizzard is getting rid of class bugs and borderline exploits then they will be taking a look at skills that are considered "garbage" by the community.
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My problem with the build is when I'm sometimes grouped up with my monk friend who is really tank. I feel pretty useless at that point. When he leaves though all my other friend who are all dps complain hard when I afk because minibosses wreck them. It's nice that the new meta game practically requires someone to be the beefy guy and take the mobs attention past T2.
Is there a certain weapon to shoot for on this build? I'm using a crappy thing right now.
If possible I recommend people moving into A2-A3 inferno with this build have at least a 850 DPS 1 hander with as much BASE (not with a tacked on IAS modifier) speed as possible. A one-handed sword, dagger or ceremonial dagger with a socket for a big emerald (if possible) paired with a snake offhand with as high damage as you can find. The highest damage offhands I have found have been the snakes with ~100 min dmg and ~375-390 max damage. The offhands are really cheap and VERY good. You can find really good blue offhands with 100-385dmg with 8% crit or INT for less then 100K easily.
EDIT:
Regarding reflect damage bosses they can be easily countered by kiting to a Health Fountain. Between kiting, pots, hex heal and a heal fountain they are fairly simple to take down. You just have to take them slower then normal. Act 3 Always seems to have at least 2 fountains. One to the top and one to the bottom of the map.
The large benefit of Direbats so far that I have seen is it allows you to kill boss packs that are virtually impossible with splinters without zerging down a boss. Most notably immune minions and reflect damage! Also kiting boss packs is much more easier with direbats. The range and width of the bat allows very simple hit and run casting that splinters actually feels clunky doing. Bats also have a slow travel time. This is actually a benefit because while kiting mobs will run into the bat keeping you at a far distance while still doing good damage. Not to mention if you get good at positioning you can be damaging an entire group of bosses at once instead of one at a time.
The build has it's downside no doubt. It's mana intensive and you pretty much are forced into Vision Quest. I don't really consider this a downside though as long as you have space to put in Spirit Vessel the other two perks really are up for debate. The only other issue with the build is damage consistency in co-op games. When HP skyrockets the bats become less useful and you end up standing around waiting a few seconds per bat cast when you get low.
I think Direbats are getting a bad rap. People think you need to be a heavy cooldown build to use the builds and that is totally false. I run a similar build to the OP except I swapped Splinters for Direbats and Pierce the Veil for Vision Quest and it functions great. I love the build for farming solo it really is fun. Depending on my setting (single or co-op) I swap Army for Totem.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#cZURkP!UbV!aaZaab
First I took the OPs approach and stacked very high crit modifiers both crit chance and critical damage where ever I could without a huge hit to int. The build was very fun with direbats and absolutely hilarious with Zombie wall (Pile On).
My character sheet (estimated):
30-33k damage
30% crit
209% crit damage
Direbats were critting for 150K+ virtually. The really fun thing though was Pile On it was criting for 500K and I saw as high as 750K. This skill alone totally obliterated boss packs (minus reflect damage as it would one shot me).
The problem with the build however is it sacrificed almost all my ias. My two handed weapon was staple to getting such a high crit modifier but it was slow and I was a sitting duck for range mobs. This became a huge issue for where I'm farming now... Siegebreaker.
I decided to swap out the (1k dps) two hander with over 100% crit bonus to a blue 1k dps one hander with a 300ish dmg offhand. The result is less then stunning crits but it allows me to control space better leading me to survive easier. Right now I'm running with the cookie cutter splinter build with Direbats instead of splinters and Vision Quest. The build is very good for farming. Some stated having issues over splinters, but I think splinters sucks because of it's single target nature. Face it minibosses are tough no matter your spec but direbats let me blow up entire rooms of guys almost instantly something that would take forever on a splinters build. Just last night I had a 56 kill streak on the bridge after a few casts.
Does the build have a downside? Yes your skill is by no means spammable like splinters and to get vision quest going requires skills on cooldown, but once you get to act3 or 4 you will be constantly having your utility skills on cooldown with spirit walk as backup. I love the build for farming.
It's usable and actually fairly good once you get used to using it. The problem with it isn't the range it's and the DoT nature of damage. I could cast one firebat and it does immediate damage to tons of mobs or I could cast Swarm and pray it jumps to additional mobs. It's a clunky spell on how it jumps that makes it frustrating to use. I'd rather use zombie wall. It's damage in AOE is actually really good and it has the bonus of holding mobs for me to direbat them more.
This said I've seen doctors using swarm in inferno. It's definitely not a unused skill it just isn't for me. When I cast a spell I need instant results not 8 seconds of results because the longer mobs are alive the longer I'm at risk of getting 1 shot.
If that's the case you can easily socket a weapon with a Emerald for 50% and you would already be doing double dmg. If you get really lucky and have a rare with passive +dmg, socket and crit bonus damage this could easily sky rocket. I've also seen gloves with high crit % and crit damage increase. I'm unsure if 300% is easily obtainable though.... I haven't paid too much attention to armors with it.
I did some quick math on dart choice and Spinters still seems like the best bet over Flame Dart for this type of build. Even with the mega critical bonus Flame Dart lags behind. This is assuming every third shot is a crit obviously this is just an average. Quick math if you have 35k dmg, 30% crit and 300% critical dmg...
Splinters after three casts:
35000 * 60% = 21 000 * 2 = 42000 + (21000 * 300%) = 105000 * 3 = 315000
Flame Dart after three casts:
35000 * 160% = 56000 * 300% = 168 000 + (56000 * 2) = 280,000
Since Splinters came in on top this got me thinking... I bet a WD gearing for this way may cause both AoE abilities and fast hitting abilities produce more overall dmgthen with IAS. Think about it. IAS is great on spammed abilities like darts, flame bomb, etc but its terrible for our expensive spells like Acid Cloud. Corpse bomb alone would crit for 210,000 in AoE. Im also thinking about Jumping Spiders. They have been considered crap, but If you can get high enough crit bonus they may easily pull a head of most spamabble skills because they would crit the most out of any ability though this is hard to theorycraft. I think the build is worth looking into. I wouldn't go so far as to abandon a good 1 hander for a 2 hander (unless its a damage increase) as some IAS is always beneficial!
That said I think insane amounts of IAS will still be better then an insane amounts of critical dmg when it comes to large targets like bosses, but for farming hordes of mobs or co-op play a critical based build may be better.
Just a quick napkin math example:
Lets assume a pack of 5 zombies on act 1 inferno... Not calculating resists or any of that just base everything. My WD has around 16k damage unbuffed. I'm assuming use of Searing Locusts.
((448%) * 16000)) * 5 = 358,400 damage. From my experience it takes the swarm around one second before it jumps so assuming the first zombie is hit instantly this amount of damage would take 12 full seconds before it has fully spread and run its damage to the pack.
358400 / (60% * 16000) = 37.3 / 3 = 12.4 casts of splinters or 37.3 splinter darts.
For some more numbers Locusts Swarm does the same damage (well within 2%) that each splinter bolt does per second to all mobs affected. Basically if you come up to a pack cast locust swarm every mob with bugs is taking 58.5% weapon damage per second.
That said Haunt is also very attractive. Same scenario with 5 zombies. You can only Haunt three mobs at a time. I'm assuming Grasping Spirit.
((575%) * 16,000)) * 3 = 276,000
Unlike Locusts Haunt does 48% weapon damage per second. If you think about this in terms of casts Haunt isn't that attractive, but do not forget Locusts require positioning while Haunt can be cast from anywhere therefore I de-deuce the time wasted casting haunt three times is also wasted by getting close to a mob and casting Locusts.
These two skills are underrated in inferno and I don't understand it because they are both better to cast over splinters. Hell Haunt alone can be cast from the same range as splinters! Shooting an elite with Haunt that you otherwise would have shot with Splinters is like hitting that mob three times with Splinters! As anyone who in inferno knows while kiting an elite pack casting Splinters three times back to back doesn't happen often.
That said real fast leveling is buying a nice rare helm on the AH (if you can afford it this with a socket: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/artisan/blacksmith/recipe/cains-laurel) and put the biggest ruby you got in it for 19%+ XP per kill.
This is not true a Korean player soloed all of Inferno with a Barbarian. My friend who plays a barb was talking about him yesterday along with his build. It sounded like pretty open knowledge.
Outside of "must have" skills like my invaluable spirit walk I don't see much problem with the game. The issue is that Barbarian is designed from the ground up to have a ton of hit points and leech ability yet when they go into melee they are paper. This is a problem. Witch Doctor is the same deal though. We can only effectively achieve high DPS by using the extremely good perk Vision Quest because our mana resource is just not sustainable when using our better skills. However, I do honestly believe when time is invested and good coordination is there Inferno can be enjoyable. I think people are hitting 60 getting super happy and also get the loot buff then they get stopped dead in their tracks after Hell.
This said I really hope many runes get needed buffs to allow more character diversity. I feel that they need to take notes on why WD's are favoring Dire Bats, Zombie Bears and Splinters so much over other skills. Nerfs are something I wasn't expecting but to be quite honest DH's were just out of line though. They could stay invulnerable almost indefinitely and that is a game breaking issue. I think right now Blizzard is getting rid of class bugs and borderline exploits then they will be taking a look at skills that are considered "garbage" by the community.