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Unlike prior to 2.0, the damage type on legendary items is random. I've had 4 butcher's sickles drop for me, and their damage types are holy, fire, poison and cold. I'd suspect that the cold damage kridershot would benefit from cull the weak. You should check to see if other skills are applying the cold slow, just to make sure.

Since I can be that guy. Play hardcore! That way dying not only removes your xp pool but also your character. Stacking pools is a cool way to get solid xp if you think that repeating quests or crowdsourcing cursed chests is fundamentally unsatisfying.

So because I blow up your pity party I like boa? I've always viewed trading as a cool part of the Diablo franchise. I loved the options it availed you of in D1, farmed Nihilthak and Mephisto for years to trade for gear I wanted. Things change. You're clearly mad about it, and that's your prerogative. I choose to view this as an opportunity to learn to invent and innovate using what I have on hand. Not being able to meticulously pre-plan and then obsessively trade for gear shouldnt be something to be mad about. Play on the fly and innovate with every drop you get, rather than obsess over having one specific item set for one specific build.

Quote from Ashy_Larry

Quote from Rasako

sounds like the guy is just here whining like a bitch and doesn't even realize that the build has just changed and may require a specific legendary or two to pull off instead of cheesing it and abusing broken game mechanics. working as intended imo

i'm not sure what it is you're saying here. the 0 dog build wasn't broken, it was intended, otherwise it wouldn't have been possible. also, you can only do the build with a "specific legendary or two" already... therefore i'm confused because your thoughts are contradicting themselves... there are no broken game mechanics at work here, just a simple application of the appropriate gearing and skill build to create a powerful build

If anything, 0dog was an implementation of how gearing and build construction will be in RoS. It involves using several legendaries in conjunction with a passive to create an interesting build, which appears to be the entire focus of the expansion. The build possibility that I am most excited about so far in the expansion is shooting fetishes. Should be able to make fetish army do some ridiculous stuff in RoS.

I fail to see how 0 dogs is dead. Look at the 200 or so item screencaps on this site. There is a WD appropriate legendary in every slot with cool down reduction. Troll post to promote your stream and or recorded gameplay.

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2. Coefficient change/removal. With how life on hit currently functions, removing life steal may make several fast hitting, high coefficient skills mandatory as healing abilities. I'd like to see coefficients removed, there's no reason that, for example, rain of toads should return 80% of my life on hit and zombie bears return 20. The game is starting to bias away from hard hittin slow skills towards faster skills.

So you want every skill that hits 5 times a second to now give 5x the life of every skill that hits 1x per second?

Coefficients are *the* way to balance this, and they already do so better than the above sentence would suggest. They could be more transparent and balanced better, but I don't follow how removal is going to magically fix anything.

Current coefficients balance nothing, hence my post. The example I used is the exact opposite of coefficients balancing anything. The faster/ higher hits per second skill is rain of toads, and it has 4x the coefficient.

Maybe to clarify how this is messed up in plainer terms (still WD skills):

Acid cloud with no rune is approximately .5 proc coefficient. Each time it hits you get .5(LoH) in life returned.

Acid cloud with acid rain rune is +12 yard radius to acid cloud, and a change of coefficient to somewhere around .8.

These skills return their life on hit each time the acid pool ticks (so a lot).

For flavor we will add zombie charger: zombie bears. This skill is MUCH slower and also carries a sub 20% proc coefficient. Not only is it far slower than acid cloud in terms of damage interval, it also returns a lot less health per hit.

This is more what I was discussing. There is variance amongst the runes, as well as skills. Things function in a very hidden and non-intuitive manner. If console is any indication of where loot is going- there is LoH on gloves, pants, chests, belts, and bracers... It seems they are going to be pushing LoH as a pretty hard and viable stat. Now I know coefficients make sense for other procs, but when applied to life on hit, it makes a fairly intuitive stat much more confusing. It should, in my opinion, just be at face value... Or maybe a reduction based on difficulty. I expect a slow skill to return less health with life on hit... Because it hits slowly, not because the coefficient is terrible. There will be other life return solutions that will most likely be viable, but since they appear to be leaving LoH in game, shouldn't it be fixed to be more intuitive and functional?

Now, I understand that datamining is far from final information, but it does look like the bell is tolling for the life steal era of diablo 3. That's fine in all honesty, as life steal did tend to make health feel irrelevant. I'd like to ask the developers for RoS to please consider some changes to life on hit.

1. Functionality transparency: life on hit is governed by hidden coefficients on every skill and rune. This makes choosing skills to function with it difficult. Please assist the player population in propery integrating life on hit choices into their gear.

2. Coefficient change/removal. With how life on hit currently functions, removing life steal may make several fast hitting, high coefficient skills mandatory as healing abilities. I'd like to see coefficients removed, there's no reason that, for example, rain of toads should return 80% of my life on hit and zombie bears return 20. The game is starting to bias away from hard hittin slow skills towards faster skills.

Those are my two issues with life on hit in its current iteration, and honestly they are interrelated. I also, as stated at the beginning of the post, understand that data mined information is not final. However, life on hit implementation does have some problems that make it unwieldy and hard to understand for the common player. It needs some sort of change, if only being explained better on tooltips, before being rolled out as out only gear-able life taking skill.

Quote from shiftingsand

Running the 2 of us we try to round up as much of a zone at once as we can and we just purely AoE it down. I was just wondering if there were any pieces of gear where I had the wrong stat focuses or could really improve on, but after looking at AH prices I guess the brief gold duping problems hyper inflated the economy, and even 50m isn't enough to get much

If you have high attack speed (greater than say 1.65) and like aoe, I could suggest to you a build similar to mine. High attack speed does have some perks with firebats, but you need to adjust up your mana return.

Also, prices mostly go buck wild due to the constant devaluation of gold by third party botters and the changing of rmah gold prices; they did a fairly decent job mopping up that gold dupe. Hopefully trying a build that can incorporate higher attack speed will increase your enjoyment without too much expense!

Edit: I failed at a lot of typing.

Life steal isn't getting a nerf so much as people are going to be required to get it from items... Gloves, weapons, barb belts, or whatever else they decide to itemize with them.

Currently the game has too much ability to bypass gearing survival stats in favor of DPS stats. Instead they are forcing players to have to make more diverse and intelligent gear selections. That along with build changing items has me excited to actually play diablo 3, since the current model of stack a ton of DPS and barely enough survival to get by isnt very compelling.

First, vampire bats is very very rarely used... A few people do use it to cover sub optimal connections, such as the op... But as a whole it's not tremendously useful, as getting life steal is easy enough.

Second, for the poster that referenced cloud of bats as a ramp-up 601%, you are incorrect. It's 501% that is multiplied by 100% over the duration.... So it ramps up to 1002%.

Bats are viable with more than a skorn now, skorn is the easy button... It does what people want for a friendly price. Other builds capitalize on attack speed and do well with it (see my profile).

As a whole it appears they are removing skill runes with life steal for all classes. I find this a worthwhile change since the life steal runes are used by less than 5% of players. There are too many guides and topics that tell players to get life steal so they do, thusly making these skills mostly obsolete. I'm glad to see they are doing something about removing the chaff from the rune pool and trying to think of more interesting choices.

That aside, reading through preliminary changes, I'm glad to see WD is primarily untouched as a class. I feel the class offers a lot of power, but at the cost of needing to be skillful and having to thoughtfully balance regeneration. Our efforts as players of witch doctors will finally have to be matched by barbarians and wizards as they are reworking their win buttons, so that maybe the players will have to try.

The gear suggestions should be universally good for any WD spec.

If the spec doesn't work for you, there are plenty of other viable options to explore.

Good luck and good hunting!

Well, I surely didnt expect any real money investment, rather was just trying to get an eyeball of the gold you had to spend.

I have a suggestion for a spider bears spec that you may find comfortable:

Active skills:
Corpse Spiders-widowmakers
Zombie Charger- Zombie bears
Spirit Walk- Honored Guest
Zombie Dogs- Life Link
Soul Harvest- Vengeful Spirit
Mass Confusion- Paranoia

Passive skills:
Grave Injustice
Blood Ritual
And pick one: Spirit Vessel, Gruesome Feast, or Jungle fortitude (I recommend spirit vessel for you)

Corpse spiders will be good for small packs, trash mobs and mana return
Zombie bears is going to be your man skill for handling packs and elites
Spirit walk: 2 second invulnerability and mana return
Zombie dogs: 10% damage reduction and will face tank mobs pretty well
Soul harvest: some damage, but more importantly a large int buff to hel out your damage
Mass confusion: paranoia will help you kill elites faster and confused mobs tank for you

Gear suggestions:

I'd pick up a zunimassa's vision (helm) and a zunimassa's pox (ring). The extra mana regen, along with mana on kill and the extra all resist will improve your survival.. Along with the %life on helm and potential for more %life from an amethyst socket. If you can afford crit for the helm and ring those would be optimal solutions.

Keep rolling int gloves til you can replace the IK gloves

Finally, and this is a big one: you might want to consider getting a socketed manajuma knife, or more optimally, replacing the manajuma with a socketed non-elemental weapon with life steal. Manajuma comes with great stats, but also is fast, where WD only really benefits from IAS in a few situations. Another good solution would be a Skorn. A decent life steal/intelligence skorn is not too expensive and would be an excellent solution, regardless of spec.

Something to keep in mind when looking at upgrades

Crit > crit damage > intellect > attack speed

Even though attack speed might give an appealing paper doll DPS boost, you will actually get more benefit out o other stats, and might want to use it sparingly

I am a little confused where you are trying to go with your gear/spec, so I have a few questions first.

1- Are you playing self-found? If not, what does your budget look like?

2- Out of the skills you currently use, which do you like the feel of the most?

3- Do you have a monster power setting goal? Or are you more just looking for overall enjoyment increase?

I feel if you answer these 3 questions that I can get you some useful character solutions.

Quote from LordRyche

Well, after a couple of changes, I've gotten my resists up to 816-896, my armor is at 4180, and my life is at 70k...gave up about 4k dmg but she's rolling pretty good now, aside from those pain-in-the-ass elite Grotesques with knockback AND Vortex!! Bastiges! lol
Appreciate you kind folks' suggestions!

Something I was curious about. What's the differential between you using a ruby or emerald in your weapon? Since you are using a sword you may find you survive more consistently using a ruby... Provided that the difference in DPS is not huge.

Else, I'd say you're on the right path. I might suggest taking spiritual attunement over blood ritual. With a Zuni helm equipped, they end up being about the same, but attunement will give you a larger mana pool, and more greatly lessens the impact of long duration channeling.

Edit: I might also suggest dropping spirit vessel for gruesome feast. With 6 pickup radius, it allows you to get some big mana and health heals without moving, plus you get the super sweet bonus DPS, which will make everything a bit smoother.

Excellent ideas, and while I may not agree with them all, they would ALL add more depth to the game. +1!

A thought came to mind when reading the internal item rarity section (sparkle beams). I'm an avid borderlands player (xbl) and in later content pushes for borderlands 2 they added another rarity tier to items. Perhaps instead of creating such stringent internal rarities amongst legendaries, why not add another tier of items, "angelic" for example? You could tie the cool skill runes and other amazingly cool properties to "angelic" items, and not drown out other legendaries. In my vision of a utopian diablo, these ultra rare, and guaranteed to be good items would be bind to account. To maybe tie this in without requiring another tier of item might be that existing legendaries have a chance to be "angelic" on drop (kinda like ethereal in diablo 2), and will spawn as a guaranteed good version of that item, maybe spawning with a skill rune or other incredible stat... But still be bind to account. This way you can add more variety AND have some rewards for actually finding your own gear.