47 replies to this topic

[Xoth]

Mana issues on high MP übers fights can be addressed somewhat by using Haunt (Draining Spirit) instead of whatever skill you use least or not at all in these rather special circumstances.

The net effect of one application over 6 seconds is:

+24.4 mana (6 x 20.4 - 98) plus the net mana cost you'd have incurred doing whatever you would have done otherwise

and

575% weapon dmg minus the damage of whatever you'd have done otherwise

(Numbers change with Blood Ritual and/or Pierce the Veil)

Thus, Haunt is in the same damage league as a good bears hit and you get mana back. Its probably the most efficient use of one action there is.

[Huminator]

aerialus, on 15 November 2012 - 03:43 PM, said:

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.

Bears are slow and ineffective. If you take a look at Emberos acid rain xp spec, you will find it alot quicker and efficient compared to bears. You barely stand still with an acid rain spec, as it can be cast all over the place. As for elite packs. Sacrifice does the job as good as bears.

You can read his guide and see his video if your still in doubt.

http://www.diablofan...45#entry1080745

[aerialus]

It is decent build, but slower vs elites. With bears all elites die instantly. If you end up casting acid rain 5x against yellow boss, you are losing tons of time. Bears wipe every pack instantly.
They are also not slow used with 1h/mojo.
Problem with sacrifice is, it doesn't kill all packs if it doesn't crit. Dogs also often get dragged by some random trash. so not all hit. You need to wait till all dogs "hug" elitepack, that happens to be clumped together, and then they better all crit (or most of them).
Bears have no issues like that, you just steamroll everything equally fast, there is no random factor.
Tested both builds, and by tested I mean played like 10 hours with each minor variant doing exp runs, and so far nothing can match bears unfortunately.

Ofc we are talking about bears + acid rain, and 90% of build is acid rain, bears just vs elites, can cast 1 time vs tough mobs. With fast attack speed it is really smooth gameplay.

Edited by aerialus, 15 November 2012 - 07:15 PM.

[Huminator]

They also die instantly with sacrifice, and if they by some reason shouldnt die due to dogs movement pattern, all it takes is 1 acid rain and you can toss that from 40 yards distance. Time a run of each spec. I guarantee you that if you just play nearly okay. The acid rain spec will be 10-20% quicker.

Edited by Huminator, 15 November 2012 - 08:02 PM.

[NeutroNova]

My experience is as such. There are three primary builds you need to figure out for yourself, Low MP paragon/MF grinding is going to be different then high MP Paragon/mf/key grinding,  and lastly an Uber build. Even though there is a lot of overlap I do have 3 different builds for each scenario and I have half a dozen items used to compliment each build.

From what I gathered you are having mana issues while farming higher end MP levels so I will be talking specifically about that. Acid rain starts sucking around mp3 or 4 plus. There is only one logical goto for mobs with such high health, that is bears. bears will run your mana pool dry even with high regen and a large mana pool. There are only 4 thing I have found that efficiently help with mana regen beyond gear.

1:Spirit walk with mana regen rune... its a nice little bump and becomes really efficent with high PuR when coupled with number  3. The reason for this is in large packs once demons start dieing the CD on spirit walk becomes reset really quickly allowing you to regen your mana every couple of seconds

2:Gruesome feast: Mana regen and dps boost from globes, benefits greatly with large PuR

3:grave injustice: CD reduction and % mana boost from any enemy death within your PuR

4: BBVD with mana regen: I have close to 100 mana regen, when I use BBVD I can spam bears indefinitely while standing in BBVD.

All these things combined give a lot of mana regen to a typical bears build. SO my final prognosis is this, while your gear is decent you dont have the PuR to properly use your passives and are thus oom'ing like mad.

Hope I helped

[insect]

While a lot of WDs say MP = DMG, I run a very low MP build and still clear very quickly.

No mana regen or abilities needed; Try this out:  http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#ShUdgY!aWV!cccccc

You will need really high attack speed though for the Fetishes, so with a Skorn, I'm not sure this would work, but it solves all mana problems easily and you keep a high DPS.  If you want, switch the locusts for bears/wall of zombies and if you have enough HP/Ar/AR you can get rid of jungle fort for a different passive.

[aerialus]

Huminator, on 15 November 2012 - 08:01 PM, said:

They also die instantly with sacrifice, and if they by some reason shouldnt die due to dogs movement pattern, all it takes is 1 acid rain and you can toss that from 40 yards distance. Time a run of each spec. I guarantee you that if you just play nearly okay. The acid rain spec will be 10-20% quicker.

I really don't understand how can it be faster with skill tthat has cooldown. You can use sacrifice 1x vs elite. If you have dogs summoned from passive (which also lowers your run speed, since you need 3 passive for most efficient farming, grave injustice, gruesome feast and spirit vessel for extra 2s cooldown reduction). These dogs don't magically appear in the middle of elitepack, they need to get there, and they are distracted by other targets. Also then elitepack moves and spreads, you can't hit them all with sacrifice.
This skill sometimes works great, but often time it deals very little damage if you miss it, for reasons listed above. The problem is to hit elitepack with dogs.
If you had 0 cd dogs and could just spam them at very fast cast rate vs stunned elitepack, that is clumped and affected by all aoe - then it would be as fast as bears. But this is entirely different build and gear.

I tested this variant, both with dogs from circle of life and second with dogs that i summon manually to detonate them instantly in the middle of elitepack. In both cases significantly worse than using bears instead.

[Huminator]

aerialus, on 15 November 2012 - 11:03 PM, said:

Huminator, on 15 November 2012 - 08:01 PM, said:

They also die instantly with sacrifice, and if they by some reason shouldnt die due to dogs movement pattern, all it takes is 1 acid rain and you can toss that from 40 yards distance. Time a run of each spec. I guarantee you that if you just play nearly okay. The acid rain spec will be 10-20% quicker.

I really don't understand how can it be faster with skill tthat has cooldown. You can use sacrifice 1x vs elite. If you have dogs summoned from passive (which also lowers your run speed, since you need 3 passive for most efficient farming, grave injustice, gruesome feast and spirit vessel for extra 2s cooldown reduction). These dogs don't magically appear in the middle of elitepack, they need to get there, and they are distracted by other targets. Also then elitepack moves and spreads, you can't hit them all with sacrifice.
This skill sometimes works great, but often time it deals very little damage if you miss it, for reasons listed above. The problem is to hit elitepack with dogs.
If you had 0 cd dogs and could just spam them at very fast cast rate vs stunned elitepack, that is clumped and affected by all aoe - then it would be as fast as bears. But this is entirely different build and gear.

I tested this variant, both with dogs from circle of life and second with dogs that i summon manually to detonate them instantly in the middle of elitepack. In both cases significantly worse than using bears instead.

You dont take spirit vessel, you take circle of life, which gives you 3 zombie dogs instantly, assuming you have pickup radius duh. So there is no thing called cooldown. And considering your flying from pack to pack of trash. Again your pickup radius make sure you basicly got no cooldown on spiriit walk and horrify with walker,

Again i can only repeat myself.:

http://www.diablofan...45#entry1080745

Watch and Then decide.

Everything has been tested inside and out. And the spec and playstyle that came out on top, happens to be the spec Emberos have made a thread about.

[Emberos]

Personally feel you're both right - depending on the MP level.  At low MPs (0,1,2), I really don't see the need for Bears at all.  Sac works 90+% of the time -- yes there's a rare occasion it doesn't but not enough for me to drop another skill to bring Bears in.  Also, and credit to Aerialus on posting about this, I'm currently using Zombie Dogs / Final Gift + Circle of Life due to increased Globe drop that combo causes.  I've also upped my pickup radius to 32 so I'm grabbing globes that I would miss as I ran forward to clear content.  All of this ups damage, ups mana return (which lets me use Jaunt instead of Honored Guest for more speed), gives more cooldown reduction (which puts Jaunt up more often), and all around gives me more speed than putting Bears in that Dog slot.  It also gives me the ability to double-sac on an elite pack if there are issues with the first Sac.   I'm in the mid-60 mil xp/hr now with this setup and I really wouldn't change much about it.

All of that said, we move into a higher MP level and no question Bears would start to show their worth -- but as we've all discussed before no great reason to go up in MP level if we are farming Paragon XP/Legendaries.

Edited by Emberos, 16 November 2012 - 05:42 AM.

[aerialus]

Well, one reason might be you are using skorn.
I'm at nearly 2 attacks per second with high end manajuma knife, and bears feel really smooth and responsive.
I find myself in a situation where dogs from circle of life simply get stuck vs some remaining trash enemies, they don't all hit elite (or i have to wait before they "hug" elitepack", and be lucky it doesn't spread before that happens). It is just not enough very often for me. With circle of life, you have only 1 cast vs elite. It is actually worse than if you didn't use circle of life, use dogs as active skill. It still resets cooldown for each elite, and you can manually summon it on top of elite, and detonate immediately. Costs 2 active skills so not worth it of course.
While fast bears rape elitepack instantly, giving you even an option to increase mp as high as 3-4, since it makes no difference in run speed.


Also don't underestimate spirit vessel. 2s less cooldown on both of your speed buffs and soul harvest which is animationless aoe 230% if used with this rune. It really adds up through all the run.
I know it is kind of sad that very first generic version of this build (gruesome feast, grave injustice, spirit vessel), seems to still be one of the best if not the best, but this combo is really powerful. If you drop spirit vessel, you really waste some time, waiting for your cooldowns. Not every pack always resets spirit walk, you always can cast it little bit later without that passive. It has pretty significant impact on run speed. Also with spirit vessel you will never die to reflect, if it is causing you problem.

But again, it depends on gear, running with slow skorn, is entirely different base for build, some things work better with this, some worse.

Edited by aerialus, 16 November 2012 - 08:55 AM.

[IcepickD]

NeutroNova, on 15 November 2012 - 08:22 PM, said:

My experience is as such. There are three primary builds you need to figure out for yourself, Low MP paragon/MF grinding is going to be different then high MP Paragon/mf/key grinding,  and lastly an Uber build. Even though there is a lot of overlap I do have 3 different builds for each scenario and I have half a dozen items used to compliment each build.

From what I gathered you are having mana issues while farming higher end MP levels so I will be talking specifically about that. Acid rain starts sucking around mp3 or 4 plus. There is only one logical goto for mobs with such high health, that is bears. bears will run your mana pool dry even with high regen and a large mana pool. There are only 4 thing I have found that efficiently help with mana regen beyond gear.

1:Spirit walk with mana regen rune... its a nice little bump and becomes really efficent with high PuR when coupled with number  3. The reason for this is in large packs once demons start dieing the CD on spirit walk becomes reset really quickly allowing you to regen your mana every couple of seconds

2:Gruesome feast: Mana regen and dps boost from globes, benefits greatly with large PuR

3:grave injustice: CD reduction and % mana boost from any enemy death within your PuR

4: BBVD with mana regen: I have close to 100 mana regen, when I use BBVD I can spam bears indefinitely while standing in BBVD.

All these things combined give a lot of mana regen to a typical bears build. SO my final prognosis is this, while your gear is decent you dont have the PuR to properly use your passives and are thus oom'ing like mad.

Hope I helped

You did, sure sound like that there should be a different build for everything. I would split this into 3 categories
1)Low MP 0-3. No need for mana regen there, everything dies in 1-2 hits. Depending on the gear, this is the way it works with me. I'm guessing that someone with much higher DMG output than me can put here more MPs
2)4-7 Need for more mana regen, Where it takes some time to kill elites, so you would actually need to use some of the Mana gain spells, probably a few of them
3) 8-10 + ubers, where there actually is no chance in having full mana, unless you are 1H + OH and have widowmaker.

The numbers in these do change depending from DMG. Cause if you can kill elites in 5 sec in any MP you will not need much mana regen. Since the pool you have is going to be enough.

I did some rounds of testing: Remove the pierce, use the Blood Ritual. 4 zunimassa + spirit walk + grave injustice. All in favor of mana regen. I feel the difference for sure.

Bottom line is: unlike some classes we have to put into much more into resource management.

[IcepickD]

aerialus, on 16 November 2012 - 08:51 AM, said:

Well, one reason might be you are using skorn.
I'm at nearly 2 attacks per second with high end manajuma knife, and bears feel really smooth and responsive.
I find myself in a situation where dogs from circle of life simply get stuck vs some remaining trash enemies, they don't all hit elite (or i have to wait before they "hug" elitepack", and be lucky it doesn't spread before that happens). It is just not enough very often for me. With circle of life, you have only 1 cast vs elite. It is actually worse than if you didn't use circle of life, use dogs as active skill. It still resets cooldown for each elite, and you can manually summon it on top of elite, and detonate immediately. Costs 2 active skills so not worth it of course.
While fast bears rape elitepack instantly, giving you even an option to increase mp as high as 3-4, since it makes no difference in run speed.


Also don't underestimate spirit vessel. 2s less cooldown on both of your speed buffs and soul harvest which is animationless aoe 230% if used with this rune. It really adds up through all the run.
I know it is kind of sad that very first generic version of this build (gruesome feast, grave injustice, spirit vessel), seems to still be one of the best if not the best, but this combo is really powerful. If you drop spirit vessel, you really waste some time, waiting for your cooldowns. Not every pack always resets spirit walk, you always can cast it little bit later without that passive. It has pretty significant impact on run speed. Also with spirit vessel you will never die to reflect, if it is causing you problem.

But again, it depends on gear, running with slow skorn, is entirely different base for build, some things work better with this, some worse.

Sure thing. Weapon is everything. I've been telling that from the start, many great ideas were here good only for 1h +OH combo.
I feel that my skorn has quite nice LS, and it also hits like a truck. Also I feel that I have waisted some stats on my gear, like AS from lacuni and future items I plan to take, that have AS as default. I feel like there are more ways to improve the DPS when wearing the  1H+OH combo.
AS just feels like a paper DMG to me, and it does not contribute much to my DMG output. Only to faster cast. It is too expensive to get for the benefits I see.

[aerialus]

Thing with attack speed and fast farming is, you have nearly unlimited mana. I can spam acid rain as much as I want even with frenzied shrine. You get so much mana from health globes and kills, it actually scales perfectly, Spamming acid rain faster - make your runs faster.
It doesn't work quite as well at higher mp or in ubers of course.

[Beasty30]

Acidrain sucks in party at mp7+... Its almost 100%useless there and you wont be of any help. Bears is pretty much the only build that I have seen working on mp7+ in partys.
The build of Emberos is very good at low level, but once you hit 100 you want to switch to bears or something else for high dps spikes vs packs.
Bears are sick, you can crit for 3m+ with a monk and a cm wiz in your party. Extrahealth packs will melt very quickly.
I use a bad skorn atm, with 4 pieces of zunimassa set. I have +25pickup radius and with the healthglobe buff and soul harvest i have mostly >400k dps while never running out of mana due to the low ias of my skorn.
I m currently looking to get a good skorn to get closer to 300kdps unbuffed/500k buffed. Hopefully once i have 6% lifesteal reflect damage wont be a problem anymore.


This topic is ment for highend speccs not low level farming speccs imo There is already enough out there for that.

Edited by Beasty30, 17 November 2012 - 01:16 PM.

[Huminator]

But your definition of high end? At paragon 100, the best place to farm legendaries is still the low monster power... The high monster power is only good for 3 things. #1. Key farming. #2. Ubber boss farming. #3. Fun.

Blizzard has sadly designed the monster power system so, that if you want to play on the higher monster powers, unless its for keys and ubber boss drops. Your punished. Your punished in the way, that mean your Farming efficiency drops more and more for each moster power level above 3. Lets say you have theoreticly the best gear in game. Best in slot on every item. Even then, your most efficient monster power for gear farming is 1-3 depending on your class. Everything above is setting you back in efficiency. So unless your doing it for fun, keys or ubber boss drops. Monster power above 3 comes with the cost of decreased farming (XP and Loot). Thats just how it is.

[IcepickD]

Beasty30, on 17 November 2012 - 01:05 PM, said:

This topic is ment for highend speccs not low level farming speccs imo There is already enough out there for that.

Exactly! I've been trying to explain that all time

Anyhow: this is what worked for me:
I dropped Pierce, gotten myself a Blood ritual.
Taken Mass confusion with paranoia, jinx, BBW with mana regen and spirit walk with mana regen. I've been doing the ubers on MP10 with my friends and now I have all the mana I need. I run out of it at some point, but have it most of the time.
Bears and Rain of toads for DMG.

Thanks to all for help and ideas!

Edited by IcepickD, 17 November 2012 - 11:25 PM.

[carlucio]

Get 100 mana regen, use blood ritual, pride, problem solved.

[aerialus]

The thing with efficiency, I'm not quite sure if going high mp is such bad thing. For exp for sure.
But if you take into account bonus item from trash monsters, that chance for it is increased with mp. How do people know it is not worth to run for example mp7 with 300k unbuffed dps for drops? It is easy to measure for exp, and it isn't worth it, but for legendaries, I'm not quite so sure.
Or variant where you do even high mp, mp10 even but skip elites (they don't get bonus item at all, only extra mf from mp). It is really not that easy to tell what is most efficient. Also note that higher mf increases chance for higher quality rares (more affixes).

[Huminator]

aerialus, on 18 November 2012 - 11:36 AM, said:

The thing with efficiency, I'm not quite sure if going high mp is such bad thing. For exp for sure.
But if you take into account bonus item from trash monsters, that chance for it is increased with mp. How do people know it is not worth to run for example mp7 with 300k unbuffed dps for drops? It is easy to measure for exp, and it isn't worth it, but for legendaries, I'm not quite so sure.
Or variant where you do even high mp, mp10 even but skip elites (they don't get bonus item at all, only extra mf from mp). It is really not that easy to tell what is most efficient. Also note that higher mf increases chance for higher quality rares (more affixes).

Its been tested in and out. The bonuses in mf and bonuses of bonus items, is not high enough to make up for the increased hp. Run 5 hours of mp3 and another 5 hours on lets say mp8. You would not only have gained more xp, on the mp3 run, you would also have gained alot more loot. And because you get so much more loot, you also get more of the good items, aswell as more legendaries. That sadly how blizzard the monster power system. Farming the the higher monster power for increased fun, sadly comes for a prize, and thats decreased farming efficiency. Its understandeble that you want the higher monster levels to be good, but thats just denial of the facts. We can only hope that blizzard balance it better out, in a future patch.

[aerialus]

I know that low mp = more loot, but it isn't that easy to tell. Running 5 hours is not nearly enough to tell the difference. It isn't just legendary count, it is also quality of rares. And to test that you need large sample size.
You need far more testing and more people testing to eliminate rng factor.
Really good characters can clear high mp relatively fast, and getting 50% bonus item from trash for example vs 0 or 1% is quite a difference.
I'm not saying it is worth it, but from my experience I was finding substantially more items playing for example mp5 (it was slower).
I assume this is for player who hit level 100 paragon, can remove all exp bonus and focus on maximum damage.