47 replies to this topic

[IcepickD]

Here I'm at a standpoint, and don't know what to do.
You can see my profile here http://eu.battle.net...3/hero/10626439
I'm currently running through MP2 like there is nothing in front of me. Using compas rose as a speed item, planning to move it to lacuni and use SOJ or zuni POX. haven't decided yet.
My current problem is mana management. I'm using skorn and there is no way of changing that soon. I've tried completing my zuni for mana regen but did not get much out of it.

So my question is for the HIGH end WD's out there what are they doing for the mana management problem. Or do they have it at all?
I know you don't have any problems with sacrifice build or with some very high speed like before1.04 splinters etc. But what to do about the ACID/bears problem?

I can one hit everything on MP1 and 2, on MP3 almost everything and there are not a lot of problems but when doing ubers on 6+ i run out of mana fast and then I'm dead, no life steal without mana.

I can get rid of the 20% DMG from passive,and get more mana like that but what next.

[EismitSahne]

Well to be honest changing out pierce the veil would help a lot already.

Running with Pierce the Veil needs a very high mana reg as well as some skills to support it. So Skorn (missing out on up to 28 mp per sec plus over 200 extra mana) and Pierce the Veil do not fit well together.
The other thing is that your pick up radius is simply to small so often you are not getting the extra 2% mana from Grave Injustice (items with maximum mana help here a little as well).
Finally together with high Mana Spirit Walk Honored guest does a great job getting your mana back.

[Huminator]

Stop using Zombie bears. Its horrible for faming anyways.. Its only usefull for ubbers.

[aerialus]

You are using pierce the veil and having problem with mana. Interesting

Anyway, what can you do besides dropping that passive, get soj with zombie charger cost reduction, it scales with attack speed, very good affix. Soj also increases your mana pool. There is also option to get helm with mana regen, since using zuni set without it is bit counterproductive, you gain that 20 regen, but you lose potential 14 for going helm with crit. So you could as well put there different helm, legendary with both crit and regen.
For ubers you need different spec, based on blood ritual and vq, along with spiders.

High end wd with 1h/mojo and >2.00 attack speed, even with perf bears cost reduction gear and maxed out mana regen, and blood ritual, use widowmakers with bears, just spam it to gain 40mana/s while spamming, and switch it with bears.

Easiest solution for you is to swap pierce the veil with blood ritual, huge different in mana cost.
And no, bears is best wd skill, most powerful aoe attack in the game, it is only way to farm high mp, including mp10 relatively fast. Proper bear build crushes absolutely everything else from wd, including gimmky 0cd builds. Bears are our best skill.

[IcepickD]

aerialus, on 15 November 2012 - 11:31 AM, said:

You are using pierce the veil and having problem with mana. Interesting

Anyway, what can you do besides dropping that passive, get soj with zombie charger cost reduction, it scales with attack speed, very good affix. Soj also increases your mana pool. There is also option to get helm with mana regen, since using zuni set without it is bit counterproductive, you gain that 20 regen, but you lose potential 14 for going helm with crit. So you could as well put there different helm, legendary with both crit and regen.
For ubers you need different spec, based on blood ritual and vq, along with spiders.

High end wd with 1h/mojo and >2.00 attack speed, even with perf bears cost reduction gear and maxed out mana regen, and blood ritual, use widowmakers with bears, just spam it to gain 40mana/s while spamming, and switch it with bears.

Easiest solution for you is to swap pierce the veil with blood ritual, huge different in mana cost.
And no, bears is best wd skill, most powerful aoe attack in the game, it is only way to farm high mp, including mp10 relatively fast. Proper bear build crushes absolutely everything else from wd, including gimmky 0cd builds. Bears are our best skill.

Thanks for the advice, I thought that there is no way of keeping the pierce, but I love the 20% DMG boost.

Ok here is another question. Currently I'm having little to no problems with RD on higher MP. What would be the situation there with using 1h/off hand. I just hate kiting, enough of that before 1.04 with WD. Is it possible to remove the treat of RD with that. Using bears, I know it is good with ACID build you can use LOH.
Also I'm concerned with the price of items with using trifecta jewels and gloves. This seems to me like MUST GO option when using 1h+OH. Correct?
What would be the number of LOH you need to counter RD with ACID? How do bears go with LOH, i guess pourly.

[IcepickD]

EismitSahne, on 15 November 2012 - 11:12 AM, said:

Well to be honest changing out pierce the veil would help a lot already.

Running with Pierce the Veil needs a very high mana reg as well as some skills to support it. So Skorn (missing out on up to 28 mp per sec plus over 200 extra mana) and Pierce the Veil do not fit well together.
The other thing is that your pick up radius is simply to small so often you are not getting the extra 2% mana from Grave Injustice (items with maximum mana help here a little as well).
Finally together with high Mana Spirit Walk Honored guest does a great job getting your mana back.

Higher pickup wouldn't help me here! I said I have no problem with MP1-3, a little with MP4. Going MP6+ in a group for ubers is problem. Fights last long and I just don't have enough mana to contribute with my DMG, so I feel like I'm not using my potentioal DMG. Globes do not drop often enough on UBERS to help with my mana issues.
So the real question is how to get trough the long fights, how to get the mana up all the time. I don't see this problem with Barb, and their high fury gain spells, also DH have the same. I'm asking what should I do to accomplish the same, and loosing much of my DPS.
Those other classes have a way of filling their resource fast enough couple of sec. Is there a way to do this with WD? How? Don;t want to swap all my DPS for mana management, there is no point in doing that.

[Belzebuss]

aerialus, on 15 November 2012 - 11:31 AM, said:

For ubers you need different spec, based on blood ritual and vq, along with spiders.

High end wd with 1h/mojo and >2.00 attack speed, even with perf bears cost reduction gear and maxed out mana regen, and blood ritual, use widowmakers with bears, just spam it to gain 40mana/s while spamming, and switch it with bears.

I want to use bears to do Ubers, but I need heals cuz theres a lot of damage on those fights. Thats why I use Acid rain LOH combo, but the damage is not that great :/ Do you think 3% LS is good enought? Im 110k dps with skorn atm, but a LS skorn is so damm expensive u.u.

@IcepickD: bears dont proc LOH, you must use Life steal with bears. Also for farming, try changing gargantuan for sacrifice pride. It worked for me.

[Hasansabbat]

You should get honored guest instead of jaunt, and then I don't think that you would run out of mana since you have only 6 ias on items (which is good). Zunimasa's pox is not so expensive so maybe you should consider buying one for set bonus. At the moment I got 1.4 attacks per second and +28 mps from items. With that I don't have mana problems even on Mp10.

can't give links but my WD is hasansabbah#2914

[IcepickD]

Belzebuss, on 15 November 2012 - 12:13 PM, said:

aerialus, on 15 November 2012 - 11:31 AM, said:

For ubers you need different spec, based on blood ritual and vq, along with spiders.

High end wd with 1h/mojo and >2.00 attack speed, even with perf bears cost reduction gear and maxed out mana regen, and blood ritual, use widowmakers with bears, just spam it to gain 40mana/s while spamming, and switch it with bears.

I want to use bears to do Ubers, but I need heals cuz theres a lot of damage on those fights. Thats why I use Acid rain LOH combo, but the damage is not that great :/ Do you think 3% LS is good enought? Im 110k dps with skorn atm, but a LS skorn is so damm expensive u.u.

@IcepickD: bears dont proc LOH, you must use Life steal with bears. Also for farming, try changing gargantuan for sacrifice pride. It worked for me.

I tried 3% LS, and it did not work for me. That is the reason i jumped to skorn. Although to tell the truth at that time I did not have enough DPS. But from what I read on forums it is not enough.
Ok pride is good. But again, we are talking about the long fights, 5Mins, I can't have enough zombie dogs out to use pride constantly.
Would have to change most of my items for that to be effective, also I would have to make some sort of combo with sacrifice build.

[WakaDoDo]

Bears for dps, AR for LoH.

My MP6+ build http://eu.battle.net...dU.R!XcU!bcYZ.a (one active skill open for creativity). Blood ritual, VQ, honored guest, widowmakers on top of 102 mana reg does the job pretty darn well. I always have mana for AR when needed.

I feel I've soft of beaten the issue. Either pack dies before Im out of mana or in MP 7-10 I have have to move for various reasons. Then the mana gets back up pretty quickly. Lack of mana isnt really an issue for me anymore while farming.

Edited by WakaDoDo, 15 November 2012 - 12:41 PM.

[IcepickD]

Hasansabbat, on 15 November 2012 - 12:18 PM, said:

You should get honored guest instead of jaunt, and then I don't think that you would run out of mana since you have only 6 ias on items (which is good). Zunimasa's pox is not so expensive so maybe you should consider buying one for set bonus. At the moment I got 1.4 attacks per second and +28 mps from items. With that I don't have mana problems even on Mp10.

can't give links but my WD is hasansabbah#2914

This is true again for lower MP. You can use spirit walk again in 15 sec. But I spend all my mana in like 8 or less. And spirit walk gives me only 15%, dont think this would help me all the way.

What I'm looking for is a what DH, Barb or Monks have. A way to regain my full resource in a few seconds, so that I may continue with my killing for the next 5-10

[aerialus]

You can make wd without loh, that heals just through 3% ll via bears. With skorn much easier to do since it can get 6% life steal.

If you don't want to rely on loh skills (acid rain, rain of toads), in order to survive reflect, you need mitigate reflect damage.
Life steal + armor + physical resistance + additional DR from skills. Check out my other thread for formula and accurate numbers.

It is possible to stop losing health to reflect, just need to use horrify with 100% armor bonus, and dps during that. That rune + spirit walk, you can attack for quite long time, downtime where you have to stop bears is very short compared to classic approach which uses spirit walk only. It is quite fun to use this setup, and not be limited by loh items, you can buy really nice dps amulet and ignore loh for example.

[IcepickD]

WakaDoDo, on 15 November 2012 - 12:37 PM, said:

Bears for dps, AR for LoH.

My MP6+ build http://eu.battle.net...dU.R!XcU!bcYZ.a (one active skill open for creativity). Blood ritual, VQ, honored guest, widowmakers on top of 102 mana reg does the job pretty darn well. I always have mana for AR when needed.

I feel I've soft of beaten the issue. Either pack dies before Im out of mana or in MP 7-10 I have have to move for various reasons. Then the mana gets back up pretty quickly. Lack of mana isnt really an issue for me anymore while farming.

Dude, you have awesome gear. Also 1H/OH, 20+ mana regen from that alone.
How efficient is your farming? How long does a standard ACT3 runs take, on higher MP. Lets say 6.

[IcepickD]

aerialus, on 15 November 2012 - 12:45 PM, said:

You can make wd without loh, that heals just through 3% ll via bears. With skorn much easier to do since it can get 6% life steal.

If you don't want to rely on loh skills (acid rain, rain of toads), in order to survive reflect, you need mitigate reflect damage.
Life steal + armor + physical resistance + additional DR from skills. Check out my other thread for formula and accurate numbers.

It is possible to stop losing health to reflect, just need to use horrify with 100% armor bonus, and dps during that. That rune + spirit walk, you can attack for quite long time, downtime where you have to stop bears is very short compared to classic approach which uses spirit walk only. It is quite fun to use this setup, and not be limited by loh items, you can buy really nice dps amulet and ignore loh for example.

This seems like a good example of what you can do with only 3% LS.

[Huminator]

aerialus, on 15 November 2012 - 11:31 AM, said:

You are using pierce the veil and having problem with mana. Interesting

Anyway, what can you do besides dropping that passive, get soj with zombie charger cost reduction, it scales with attack speed, very good affix. Soj also increases your mana pool. There is also option to get helm with mana regen, since using zuni set without it is bit counterproductive, you gain that 20 regen, but you lose potential 14 for going helm with crit. So you could as well put there different helm, legendary with both crit and regen.
For ubers you need different spec, based on blood ritual and vq, along with spiders.

High end wd with 1h/mojo and >2.00 attack speed, even with perf bears cost reduction gear and maxed out mana regen, and blood ritual, use widowmakers with bears, just spam it to gain 40mana/s while spamming, and switch it with bears.

Easiest solution for you is to swap pierce the veil with blood ritual, huge different in mana cost.
And no, bears is best wd skill, most powerful aoe attack in the game, it is only way to farm high mp, including mp10 relatively fast. Proper bear build crushes absolutely everything else from wd, including gimmky 0cd builds. Bears are our best skill.

But if your farming the high monster power levels, your doing it all wrong anyways. High mp is only used for 2 things. Key grabbing and Ubber bosses. Farming anything above mp3 is counter productive and foolish. And oh boy bears are useless at mp3.

Edited by Huminator, 15 November 2012 - 12:59 PM.

[IcepickD]

Huminator, on 15 November 2012 - 12:59 PM, said:

aerialus, on 15 November 2012 - 11:31 AM, said:

You are using pierce the veil and having problem with mana. Interesting

Anyway, what can you do besides dropping that passive, get soj with zombie charger cost reduction, it scales with attack speed, very good affix. Soj also increases your mana pool. There is also option to get helm with mana regen, since using zuni set without it is bit counterproductive, you gain that 20 regen, but you lose potential 14 for going helm with crit. So you could as well put there different helm, legendary with both crit and regen.
For ubers you need different spec, based on blood ritual and vq, along with spiders.

High end wd with 1h/mojo and >2.00 attack speed, even with perf bears cost reduction gear and maxed out mana regen, and blood ritual, use widowmakers with bears, just spam it to gain 40mana/s while spamming, and switch it with bears.

Easiest solution for you is to swap pierce the veil with blood ritual, huge different in mana cost.
And no, bears is best wd skill, most powerful aoe attack in the game, it is only way to farm high mp, including mp10 relatively fast. Proper bear build crushes absolutely everything else from wd, including gimmky 0cd builds. Bears are our best skill.

But if your farming the high monster power levels, your doing it all wrong anyways. High mp is only used for 2 things. Key grabbing and Ubber bosses. Farming anything above mp3 is counter productive and foolish. And oh boy bears are useless at mp3.

Bears are not useless at MP3, I'm currently using those items you see on my profile to farm MP3 on MAX MF, and my runs last only 1-2 minutes longer than MP2 or MP1. I find MP1 and MP2 the same speed as I can plow through it like cheese without any difference. All die from one hit. Packs only a couple of secs difference.

[Huminator]

IcepickD, on 15 November 2012 - 01:11 PM, said:

Huminator, on 15 November 2012 - 12:59 PM, said:

aerialus, on 15 November 2012 - 11:31 AM, said:

You are using pierce the veil and having problem with mana. Interesting

Anyway, what can you do besides dropping that passive, get soj with zombie charger cost reduction, it scales with attack speed, very good affix. Soj also increases your mana pool. There is also option to get helm with mana regen, since using zuni set without it is bit counterproductive, you gain that 20 regen, but you lose potential 14 for going helm with crit. So you could as well put there different helm, legendary with both crit and regen.
For ubers you need different spec, based on blood ritual and vq, along with spiders.

High end wd with 1h/mojo and >2.00 attack speed, even with perf bears cost reduction gear and maxed out mana regen, and blood ritual, use widowmakers with bears, just spam it to gain 40mana/s while spamming, and switch it with bears.

Easiest solution for you is to swap pierce the veil with blood ritual, huge different in mana cost.
And no, bears is best wd skill, most powerful aoe attack in the game, it is only way to farm high mp, including mp10 relatively fast. Proper bear build crushes absolutely everything else from wd, including gimmky 0cd builds. Bears are our best skill.

But if your farming the high monster power levels, your doing it all wrong anyways. High mp is only used for 2 things. Key grabbing and Ubber bosses. Farming anything above mp3 is counter productive and foolish. And oh boy bears are useless at mp3.

Bears are not useless at MP3, I'm currently using those items you see on my profile to farm MP3 on MAX MF, and my runs last only 1-2 minutes longer than MP2 or MP1. I find MP1 and MP2 the same speed as I can plow through it like cheese without any difference. All die from one hit. Packs only a couple of secs difference.

Bears are useless at low mp. You got to stand still and therefor its ineffective.

[WakaDoDo]

Quote

How efficient is your farming? How long does a standard ACT3 runs take, on higher MP. Lets say 6.

I dont do standard Alkaizer runs anymore. On MP6 a pack from any act takes anywhere from 5-60 seconds, with average probably at 15-30sec.

Huminator, on 15 November 2012 - 01:21 PM, said:

Bears are useless at low mp. You got to stand still and therefor its ineffective.

Only offensive spells we have that can be used on the move is SH; vengeful spirit, SW; umbral shock(EDIT: its your physical body that explodes and not spirit realm body, so I was incorrect here) and Fetish ambush. Only one of which is standard, all which I recommendfor MP0-2 .

And please, dont turn this into bears vs acid like always T_T. The OP was interested in mana manegment.

Edited by WakaDoDo, 15 November 2012 - 02:22 PM.

[Hasansabbat]

IcepickD, on 15 November 2012 - 12:37 PM, said:

Hasansabbat, on 15 November 2012 - 12:18 PM, said:

You should get honored guest instead of jaunt, and then I don't think that you would run out of mana since you have only 6 ias on items (which is good). Zunimasa's pox is not so expensive so maybe you should consider buying one for set bonus. At the moment I got 1.4 attacks per second and +28 mps from items. With that I don't have mana problems even on Mp10.

can't give links but my WD is hasansabbah#2914

This is true again for lower MP. You can use spirit walk again in 15 sec. But I spend all my mana in like 8 or less. And spirit walk gives me only 15%, dont think this would help me all the way.

What I'm looking for is a what DH, Barb or Monks have. A way to regain my full resource in a few seconds, so that I may continue with my killing for the next 5-10

I am not talking about low MP my regular farming is on MP7-8 and sometimes I do MP10 for a change. And honered guest provides a total %30 mana in 2 seconds not % 15. The mistake most of the WD's out there doing is to think that more dps on the spread sheet the better. For example I have unbuffed 169k DPS on my spreadsheet but I can say confidently that I am one of the best damage dealer Witch Doctor in Europe.
Just to see higher dps on spread sheet you take PtV but you don't count the downtime to regenerate your mana. For me It is non-stop spamming with only bears on primary.

I have other builds for farm as well like;

/calculator/witch-doctor#fSUYdQ!UYW!cZZbcb Can't post url yet just paste it after calculator.

if you don't have problems by dropping spirit vessel this is an ok build with slow weapon&high mana regen gears. It is up to you to swap firebomb with spiders for mana or splinters. If you are struggling vs reflects you may have toads (provided you have LOH) but I like the damage output of firebomb (Crits over 1m with monk in party).

For the speed of my build I can only say how fast elites die, depending on the affixes I have seen elites on MP8 die in 3-5 seconds.

[aerialus]

Bears are not useless at low mp, even at mp1.
They are best elite killer for acid rain build. I have tested all kinds of combos, with char that hits way over 400k dps buffed, and bears win the competition. You basically erase any elitepack in 1-2 seconds at mp1 with bears, while killing everything else with acid rain.
There is no other skill that allows to consistently kill elites that fast at low mp.