Hullo all- thought I'd share a build I've been having moderate success with in inferno. And best of all, gearing for it falls on the cheaper side of things, so it's great for those fresh to inferno.
Nothing special with the build really, standard dire bats stuff. I like the 3 CC / Spirit walk combo for elite packs, as it basically lets me take on anything. Rotating those four cooldowns, things should rarely get to you.
Where this build stands out is using an incredibly slow 2Hander, ignoring attack speed, and stacking crit chance and crit damage. With what I consider mid tier gear (26K player damage / 30% crit chance / 240% crit damage) my dire bats are smashing groups, critting between 130 and 150K damage - no soul harvest. I also get 40K splinter crits on a single dart. I find this type of burst to be somewhat game changing when taking on packs of elites.
Some things to note-
It will feel like you are casting incredibly slow, and that's because you are, but don't give up until you try it on a few packs. Nothing beats the feeling of launching off a few bats, starting to kite, and then realizing nothing is chasing you because you strung together a few crits.
The idea that attack speed increases your mobility is somewhat true, but not as much as you think. A higher attack speed build will finish it's cast animations quicker, but it will also have to turn around and stop to cast more often since the damage per cast is lower. This build can afford to take a few more steps and still drop groups in about the same amount of time.
The mana is one of my favorite aspects of having a slow attack speed. I cast fewer dire bats because they have a greater impact when I do cast them. It feels like the mana resource blizzard intended for the class originally, as I don't go oom spamming my primary ability that is supposed to allow me to regen. A healthy mix of darts and bats will keep you pretty comfortable, without the need for vision quest (really dislike having my abilities on cooldown in inferno).
My other favorite thing is that the build is relatively cheap to gear for. If you can afford the attack speed, more power to you, I'm sure the build will only increase in power, but every class is currently obsessed with attack speed on gear, and the AH prices are getting pretty outrageous.
I tried the build with 1H/OH weapons thinking the 8% crit on an offhand would be too good to pass up, but I found myself out of mana and with direbats that didn't really hit hard enough to have the kind of impact I was looking for. There is a real sweet spot in damage for our class, involving killing things in a certain number of casts (mana) and a certain number of seconds (the intertwining of spirit walk / spirit vessel) and I think this build falls into that spot quite nicely. I realize people have been ignoring the mana issue by going only splinters dart build but I just can't seem to bring myself to take on the minions of hell only armed with a spit ball.
So grab yourself a 2 hander (crit damage with an empty socket is a must) and let me know how it works for you.
I've done a few seigebreaker (act3) runs with a mage friend of mine with about the same level of gear. I won't say no problem to that, but it was mostly insane spearthrower elites that caused the problems
Glad to hear you like it Pok. You will run into some frustrating bat pathing occasionally, the worst of which is standing in a door and the bat flying into the wall next to you. But every now and then the bat takes a perfect wandering route and swoops back and forth hitting everything.
Act 1 inferno is actually pretty sweet because build options can be a lot more diverse, and as Derwiv stated, usually more time efficient farming. I miss my fetish ambush. Maybe your post will inspire me to bring it back. Probably swap it out for Horror.
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.
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.
Frenzied Muffin - you hit the nail right on the head with the "overall damage part". While IAS is a great stat, I feel like it somewhat inflates the character damage sheet in a way that can be deceiving. Reaching incredible damage numbers but being reduced to spamming a single target damage spell just might not be the best way to take on champion packs (the real challenge in inferno).
I personally think blizzard needs to look at how witch doctor primaries function - all other classes either gain their resource with primaries or they have no cost, but it's possible for witch doctor to actually lose mana using only primary. While overall I do like the mana on this build, it hasn't been enough to sustain corpse bomb / bears over bats. Those spells are just a little too much without vision quest.
Once you take into account that IAS is also completely inflated on the auction house as well, I think this build becomes totally competitive.
Awesome This was EXACTLY what I was looking for A build and advice to make dire bats in inferno work! Just spent 2mio on the AH to pick up some gear with crit
Out of curiosity, why do you use Horrify over Mass Confusion? I'm not in Inferno yet, so it may just be ignorance, but in Hell I vastly prefer making enemies turn on one another.
With Mass confusion you will still get hit a lot more, then Horrify. When you MC a group they don't stop attacking you right away, they will still finish there attacks. If you do not mine getting hit more/dieing MC with +damage is really good.
It's really more about the cooldown length for me. I find during a kiting session, by rotating spirit walk / wall of Z / hex / horror, I can basically kite indefinitely. Right when you get in trouble something is always coming off cooldown. Remove one of those from the equation and things start to catch you, which is death.
Don't get me wrong, the longer cooldowns have great effects, but they're not great enough to down a shielding group within their timespan, or some other troublesome affix.
Poison Dart + Splinters with tons of Attack Speed and Crit/Crit damage will do more damage. Each Poison Dart will crit for about 50k or so. If you get your attacks up to 3.0, well, you see where this is going.
This build sounds really cool. However it basically makes you a shitty version of a Demon Hunter. WHo has a very similar ability that crits for 250k easily.
The real issue you are going to find is that post Act 2, which is quite easily farmable and easy to progress with this build is kiting becomes rather difficult come Act 3, ie Soul Lashers, Spear Throwers, your speed and fast casting will become almost a must. The thing about inferno is finding what works for you and how you can progress and what you can put up with. You will die, you will get frustrated, so if you can make this work in the harder acts props to you. I would like to see how it fares in the later acts, I personally prefer move speed and attack speed.
Poison Dart + Splinters with tons of Attack Speed and Crit/Crit damage will do more damage. Each Poison Dart will crit for about 50k or so. If you get your attacks up to 3.0, well, you see where this is going.
This build sounds really cool. However it basically makes you a shitty version of a Demon Hunter. WHo has a very similar ability that crits for 250k easily.
assuming equal gear, 180% single target cannot do more damage than 220% piercing. I understand with a fast attack you can't cast many bats, but I don't think you're giving piercing enough credit. Even a non-crit bat for me does 40K. If this travels through 5 enemies, that's 200K for one cast. A noncrit dart hits for what, 10K? You'd have to cast splinters aprox. six times to reach that kind of damage.
Also, add soul harvest and better gear than I have and I'm sure you'll be hitting 250K. You could say it's a shittier demon hunter, but you're also comparing your class to probably the most OP damage dealing class. And if 250K piercing makes me a shitty demon hunter, what is a kiting fast attack splinters build equivalent to?
I'm not saying spinters spam fast attack is a bad build, or that mine is better, but I think it's important to talk out new strategies and not have everyone sheep the same build that might not be optimal.
Poison Dart + Splinters with tons of Attack Speed and Crit/Crit damage will do more damage. Each Poison Dart will crit for about 50k or so. If you get your attacks up to 3.0, well, you see where this is going.
This build sounds really cool. However it basically makes you a shitty version of a Demon Hunter. WHo has a very similar ability that crits for 250k easily.
assuming equal gear, 180% single target cannot do more damage than 220% piercing. I understand with a fast attack you can't cast many bats, but I don't think you're giving piercing enough credit. Even a non-crit bat for me does 40K. If this travels through 5 enemies, that's 200K for one cast. A noncrit dart hits for what, 10K? You'd have to cast splinters aprox. six times to reach that kind of damage.
Also, add soul harvest and better gear than I have and I'm sure you'll be hitting 250K. You could say it's a shittier demon hunter, but you're also comparing your class to probably the most OP damage dealing class. And if 250K piercing makes me a shitty demon hunter, what is a kiting fast attack splinters build equivalent to?
I'm not saying spinters spam fast attack is a bad build, or that mine is better, but I think it's important to talk out new strategies and not have everyone sheep the same build that might not be optimal.
I think the problem is. It's not just a shitty Demon Hunter, it's also a shitty Wizard. Who also has abilities that pierce and do more damage then ours bats do. While having defensive armors, teleport, illusions and Blizzard allowing them to perma kite.
At the end of the day. Witch Doctors are gimped. They are arguably the worst class in Diablo, and easily the worst farming class. What a lot of people do to farm Siegebreaker for example, is level a Wizard. Then swap their Witch Doctors gear onto the Wizard. Why? simple, Wizards dominate everything much like Demon Hunters, and the Witch Doctor is stuck running for his life with 15 second cooldowns on his CC and 3 minute cooldowns on his damage.
The reason Poison Dart is superior, is the rate you can cast them vs the mana cost. You will simply not be fast enough to cast enough bats to hurt enemies before you have to turn and run, or run out of mana. Bats are simply to slow, and when you couple them with attack speed, drain our mana way to fast.
Wizards get an ability which is almost the same as Bats. Shock Pulse with Piercing Orb rune. Except it costs them no Arcane power.
I would love bats to be viable. I would love bears to be viable for more then 20 seconds. I would love most of our abilities to be viable. They just aren't.
If you still feel it's viable. Buy the gear, and head into Act III. Do a 5 stack siegebreaker run. If you are killing champ packs in under 10 seconds like Wizards and Demon Hunters, then you have a winner. But last time I checked, even 70-80k Witch Doctors are stuck letting Tyreal do most of the work.
I think Dire Bats will get you the closest to what Demon Hunters and Wizards can do. It's our only legitimate AoE ranged ability honestly. But as others have said, it makes you a shitty version those other classes. The mana cost is really too high compared to Piercing Orb / Elemental Arrow.
Also, I think abilities like Multishot are more effective than abilities that pierce in a straight line. There are a lot more instances where you want something to do spread AoE like Zombie Bears or Exposive Beast than in a straight line.
If you want some entertainment, get a few items with a "chance to stun on hit" and go try Fire Bomb (Fire Pit) + Locusts Swarm (Searing). It's hilarious.
Yeah... I'm starting to wonder if WDs become a lot better by stacking CC on hit with pet auras + AoE / DoT abilities. I haven't tried it yet, but I'd like to see what it's like from someone who has good gear with high damage.
The only group i couldn't deal with are blue/golden Soul Lashers. I just don't know what to to against them. Especially if they have fast as Affix.
Other than that it went on quite smooth.
I don't think anyone knows what to do against fast soul lashers. Clearly the designers behind soul lashers have no soul. Pop cooldowns and hope that Tyrael can pull it off?
The build - http://us.battle.net...URXk!VWb!aaZZbb
Nothing special with the build really, standard dire bats stuff. I like the 3 CC / Spirit walk combo for elite packs, as it basically lets me take on anything. Rotating those four cooldowns, things should rarely get to you.
Where this build stands out is using an incredibly slow 2Hander, ignoring attack speed, and stacking crit chance and crit damage. With what I consider mid tier gear (26K player damage / 30% crit chance / 240% crit damage) my dire bats are smashing groups, critting between 130 and 150K damage - no soul harvest. I also get 40K splinter crits on a single dart. I find this type of burst to be somewhat game changing when taking on packs of elites.
Some things to note-
It will feel like you are casting incredibly slow, and that's because you are, but don't give up until you try it on a few packs. Nothing beats the feeling of launching off a few bats, starting to kite, and then realizing nothing is chasing you because you strung together a few crits.
The idea that attack speed increases your mobility is somewhat true, but not as much as you think. A higher attack speed build will finish it's cast animations quicker, but it will also have to turn around and stop to cast more often since the damage per cast is lower. This build can afford to take a few more steps and still drop groups in about the same amount of time.
The mana is one of my favorite aspects of having a slow attack speed. I cast fewer dire bats because they have a greater impact when I do cast them. It feels like the mana resource blizzard intended for the class originally, as I don't go oom spamming my primary ability that is supposed to allow me to regen. A healthy mix of darts and bats will keep you pretty comfortable, without the need for vision quest (really dislike having my abilities on cooldown in inferno).
My other favorite thing is that the build is relatively cheap to gear for. If you can afford the attack speed, more power to you, I'm sure the build will only increase in power, but every class is currently obsessed with attack speed on gear, and the AH prices are getting pretty outrageous.
I tried the build with 1H/OH weapons thinking the 8% crit on an offhand would be too good to pass up, but I found myself out of mana and with direbats that didn't really hit hard enough to have the kind of impact I was looking for. There is a real sweet spot in damage for our class, involving killing things in a certain number of casts (mana) and a certain number of seconds (the intertwining of spirit walk / spirit vessel) and I think this build falls into that spot quite nicely. I realize people have been ignoring the mana issue by going only splinters dart build but I just can't seem to bring myself to take on the minions of hell only armed with a spit ball.
So grab yourself a 2 hander (crit damage with an empty socket is a must) and let me know how it works for you.
I've done a few seigebreaker (act3) runs with a mage friend of mine with about the same level of gear. I won't say no problem to that, but it was mostly insane spearthrower elites that caused the problems
Act 1 inferno is actually pretty sweet because build options can be a lot more diverse, and as Derwiv stated, usually more time efficient farming. I miss my fetish ambush. Maybe your post will inspire me to bring it back. Probably swap it out for Horror.
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.
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 personally think blizzard needs to look at how witch doctor primaries function - all other classes either gain their resource with primaries or they have no cost, but it's possible for witch doctor to actually lose mana using only primary. While overall I do like the mana on this build, it hasn't been enough to sustain corpse bomb / bears over bats. Those spells are just a little too much without vision quest.
Once you take into account that IAS is also completely inflated on the auction house as well, I think this build becomes totally competitive.
Don't get me wrong, the longer cooldowns have great effects, but they're not great enough to down a shielding group within their timespan, or some other troublesome affix.
This build sounds really cool. However it basically makes you a shitty version of a Demon Hunter. WHo has a very similar ability that crits for 250k easily.
Which legendaries are always with crit chance?
My poor WD.
Abugu
assuming equal gear, 180% single target cannot do more damage than 220% piercing. I understand with a fast attack you can't cast many bats, but I don't think you're giving piercing enough credit. Even a non-crit bat for me does 40K. If this travels through 5 enemies, that's 200K for one cast. A noncrit dart hits for what, 10K? You'd have to cast splinters aprox. six times to reach that kind of damage.
Also, add soul harvest and better gear than I have and I'm sure you'll be hitting 250K. You could say it's a shittier demon hunter, but you're also comparing your class to probably the most OP damage dealing class. And if 250K piercing makes me a shitty demon hunter, what is a kiting fast attack splinters build equivalent to?
I'm not saying spinters spam fast attack is a bad build, or that mine is better, but I think it's important to talk out new strategies and not have everyone sheep the same build that might not be optimal.
I think the problem is. It's not just a shitty Demon Hunter, it's also a shitty Wizard. Who also has abilities that pierce and do more damage then ours bats do. While having defensive armors, teleport, illusions and Blizzard allowing them to perma kite.
At the end of the day. Witch Doctors are gimped. They are arguably the worst class in Diablo, and easily the worst farming class. What a lot of people do to farm Siegebreaker for example, is level a Wizard. Then swap their Witch Doctors gear onto the Wizard. Why? simple, Wizards dominate everything much like Demon Hunters, and the Witch Doctor is stuck running for his life with 15 second cooldowns on his CC and 3 minute cooldowns on his damage.
The reason Poison Dart is superior, is the rate you can cast them vs the mana cost. You will simply not be fast enough to cast enough bats to hurt enemies before you have to turn and run, or run out of mana. Bats are simply to slow, and when you couple them with attack speed, drain our mana way to fast.
Wizards get an ability which is almost the same as Bats. Shock Pulse with Piercing Orb rune. Except it costs them no Arcane power.
I would love bats to be viable. I would love bears to be viable for more then 20 seconds. I would love most of our abilities to be viable. They just aren't.
If you still feel it's viable. Buy the gear, and head into Act III. Do a 5 stack siegebreaker run. If you are killing champ packs in under 10 seconds like Wizards and Demon Hunters, then you have a winner. But last time I checked, even 70-80k Witch Doctors are stuck letting Tyreal do most of the work.
Also, I think abilities like Multishot are more effective than abilities that pierce in a straight line. There are a lot more instances where you want something to do spread AoE like Zombie Bears or Exposive Beast than in a straight line.
Yeah... I'm starting to wonder if WDs become a lot better by stacking CC on hit with pet auras + AoE / DoT abilities. I haven't tried it yet, but I'd like to see what it's like from someone who has good gear with high damage.