Ignoring passive Life regeneration, this means each Zombie Dog will always be able to take at least 5.5 hits (21,200 [Life] / 3850 [damage])
I'm calling bull crap.
Unless the dogs summoned by a rune or passive ability are weaker than your active skill zombie dog, they get 1 or 2 shotted by charging rhino things in Act 1. I chose the GoD ZD rune that gave a 10% chance for one to be summoned if something dies in that area. This feat is surprisingly difficult post Act 1. And they die so quick, it doesn't matter anyways. The 80% slow rune is still the best for GoD. And mixed with WoZ, it almost feels like cheating.
However, gargantuan with the cleave rune is a wrecking machine. He can do Act 1 himself, without any interaction by me. He still stands in the way of wasps in Act 2 and dies rather suddenly; making his usefulness post Act 1 questionable. The 130% damage is simply overpowered.
Spider Queen is too slow to be effective; but set it on something that stands still and she's a real nuker. That's for sure. But there just aren't enough of these around.
It all depends on your build/gear. With my gear (honestly I'm a bit of a glass cannon imo) my dogs can tank well enough in act 3. Try using Jungle Fort, it'll change your opinion.
It all depends on your build/gear. With my gear (honestly I'm a bit of a glass cannon imo) my dogs can tank well enough in act 3. Try using Jungle Fort, it'll change your opinion.
It all depends on your build/gear. With my gear (honestly I'm a bit of a glass cannon imo) my dogs can tank well enough in act 3. Try using Jungle Fort, it'll change your opinion.
Pets tank exceptionally well, minus the crap that I have in the "things that own our pets" thread. I consider my gear mediocre since I only have 29k damage, but I'm very easily able to make progress through Act 3 now because of how much the dogs shore up my defenses.
Some tricks:
Health Globes RULE with 5 pets, a follower, and yourself. You're getting a shit ton more healing out of them. Use them wisely, they are awesome allies now.
Try using Horrify (Frightening Aspect) on CD to increase your pets survivability if you feel you need it. 100% more armor with 50% uptime is nothing to sneeze at.
Jungle Fortitude + Zombie Handler (more for the extra dog than the extra HPs) is friggen rad. Other WDs are experimenting with high HP builds and Blood Ritual + Fierce Loyalty for insane regen, which also seems to be panning out well. I prefer the 4th dog myself, because it seems to be less gear-dependent, but both are pretty legit.
PtV works very well with pets. The increased mana cost is nothing because, honestly, I am very rarely resummoning them. Why not get 20% more damage from all your dogs and garg? Considering the Garg is a monster it is a very good passive for pet builds.
Don't use Bad Medicine (if you were thinking of it). It reduces the damage pre-cap, which means you get dick from it unless the damage is already under the cap, or BM brings it under the cap. 95%+ of Inferno damage will be absolutely uneffected by Bad Medicine.
I'm in A2 with pretty poor gear (23k DPS, 400 lowest resist, and about 50% armor), and only certain mobs even have a chance of taking out my beasts. Basically, they have to have one of the rapid-tick ground effects to do it. Heck, in some cases I've stopped fighting and let the Dogs finish off the target to raise some mana.
I use Fierce Loyalty and Blood Ritual with Leeching Beasts, they regen about 500 per second in my gear (not counting LOH or orbs, which rock).
Ignoring passive Life regeneration, this means each Zombie Dog will always be able to take at least 5.5 hits (21,200 [Life] / 3850 [damage])
I'm calling bull crap.
Unless the dogs summoned by a rune or passive ability are weaker than your active skill zombie dog, they get 1 or 2 shotted by charging rhino things in Act 1. I chose the GoD ZD rune that gave a 10% chance for one to be summoned if something dies in that area. This feat is surprisingly difficult post Act 1. And they die so quick, it doesn't matter anyways. The 80% slow rune is still the best for GoD. And mixed with WoZ, it almost feels like cheating.
However, gargantuan with the cleave rune is a wrecking machine. He can do Act 1 himself, without any interaction by me. He still stands in the way of wasps in Act 2 and dies rather suddenly; making his usefulness post Act 1 questionable. The 130% damage is simply overpowered.
Spider Queen is too slow to be effective; but set it on something that stands still and she's a real nuker. That's for sure. But there just aren't enough of these around.
It's very clear that you're gearing incorrectly for pets. Put on some resist all and stack armor and even a shield then just spam Horrify:Frightening Aspect, their stats which are based on your own update dynamically(in real time) instead of being a snapshot of when they were summoned so spamming the 100% extra armor for them on top of stacking armor makes them very impressive. If you need extra healing, the Healing Journey rune does in fact count as regen so it's very helpful to your pets in conjunction with Fierce Loyalty.
This is my WD. So far, nothing has even come close to killing my zombie dogs or Garg except for Act 2 Blazing Constructs and... ugh, can't think of their name. Big guys in Act 3, they crash through walls, put up a damage reduction-you know what i'm talking about. Heralds of Pestilience champion packs have at least killed a dog a couple of times, but I was never worried.
So far, this WD build has been plowing through Inferno, only dying because I did something really stupid. I think the pet WD has to have the gear to support the pets otherwise they will get crushed.
My dogs were doing pretty well in act 3 and a 3 players party Monks auras helps and we even didnt have warcry. My cds were always free so i changed to sacrifice mode
My stats All res 350 armor 3k.
I havent tried solo, but in partys they are great.
The game still isn't fun to play as a Pet Doctor, but pets dying isn't the reason (because they're not dying). Even when Azmodan was completely shitting on them, they survived. Only when the third hell pool spawned beneath them, one died and before the other could, the pool phase was over.
This is my WD. So far, nothing has even come close to killing my zombie dogs or Garg except for Act 2 Blazing Constructs and... ugh, can't think of their name. Big guys in Act 3, they crash through walls, put up a damage reduction-you know what i'm talking about. Heralds of Pestilience champion packs have at least killed a dog a couple of times, but I was never worried.
So far, this WD build has been plowing through Inferno, only dying because I did something really stupid. I think the pet WD has to have the gear to support the pets otherwise they will get crushed.
Nice Equipment!
On a different note I actually die more often then my dogs do in act 3. This is because i only have 25k Health. This is due to the brick wall I have hit called no good drops. I have been on this brick wall for at least 2 months. Now I did look at AH to figure out how much i would need to help me get past this issue and everything starts at 20 million, which i don't have (only 10)
First, I'd consider not using two primaries. I'd take one primary and a second higher-mana spell. I use Roll the Bones and Searing Insects myself, but there are many reasonable options here. I would not pick a purely single-target spell, especially in Act 3. The whole act is a giant swarm of mobs. The number of 30+ kill streaks I get is ungodly. If I were trying to dart stuff down it'd take me a lot longer. Build your character around what it is you will be doing most of. Single-target for bosses will be great and all, but that's not going to make up most of your gameplay.
Secondly, you definitely are glass cannon-ish. See if you can pick up a few cheap int/vit/res all pieces and sacrifice a bit of damage for some survivability. Even something as silly as picking up a shield to use temporarily - something with int, vit, res all would probably swing you enough in favor of survivability to make things work until you can upgrade other pieces.
Thirdly, drop Slam Dance and get SOME kind of utility/survivability CD. You are trying too hard to zerg things. You need something more to help keep you alive than Zombie Dogs. I would highly suggest Spirit Walk, probably with Healing Journey. Your damage is plenty high enough, you don't need the big CD. You have almost 2x the damage I have, so if I can kill with what I have then you can afford to drop some damage to try to stay alive. With your damage, even without Slam Dance, you should be able to kill Act 3 elite packs at a decent clip.
Lastly, drop Wall of Zombies - it just doesn't work all that well with pets - and pick up either Soul Harvest (Siphon in your case, Soul to Waste when you have better survivability) or Horrify (Frightening Aspect). If you pick up Frightening Aspect, use Horrify on CD. It's a 100% boost to armor for 8 seconds with a 16s CD. That will significantly increase your survivability as well as your pets.
First, I'd consider not using two primaries. I'd take one primary and a second higher-mana spell. I use Roll the Bones and Searing Insects myself, but there are many reasonable options here. I would not pick a purely single-target spell, especially in Act 3. The whole act is a giant swarm of mobs. The number of 30+ kill streaks I get is ungodly. If I were trying to dart stuff down it'd take me a lot longer. Build your character around what it is you will be doing most of. Single-target for bosses will be great and all, but that's not going to make up most of your gameplay.
Secondly, you definitely are glass cannon-ish. See if you can pick up a few cheap int/vit/res all pieces and sacrifice a bit of damage for some survivability. Even something as silly as picking up a shield to use temporarily - something with int, vit, res all would probably swing you enough in favor of survivability to make things work until you can upgrade other pieces.
Thirdly, drop Slam Dance and get SOME kind of utility/survivability CD. You are trying too hard to zerg things. You need something more to help keep you alive than Zombie Dogs. I would highly suggest Spirit Walk, probably with Healing Journey. Your damage is plenty high enough, you don't need the big CD. You have almost 2x the damage I have, so if I can kill with what I have then you can afford to drop some damage to try to stay alive. With your damage, even without Slam Dance, you should be able to kill Act 3 elite packs at a decent clip.
Lastly, drop Wall of Zombies - it just doesn't work all that well with pets - and pick up either Soul Harvest (Siphon in your case, Soul to Waste when you have better survivability) or Horrify (Frightening Aspect). If you pick up Frightening Aspect, use Horrify on CD. It's a 100% boost to armor for 8 seconds with a 16s CD. That will significantly increase your survivability as well as your pets.
Ok, FYI the BBV is normally when i'm with my Barb and DH hunter friends to burn things fast. becuase we also had a scrub with us at the time who was doing 9 k of damage. but you are right i really don't need it. the other 2 items make perfect sense I do have a shield which does have what you are stating just drops me about 19k (but i do need to survive for pets to be effective.) I have used Spirit walk before but it seemed bugged as i would still be trapped behind walls did they fix that?
If you can get a high enough health pool, Blood Ritual plus Fierce Loyalty can do a ton to keep your pets up. My setup is a bit extreme -- I'm over 2k regen and 100k health -- but I suspect even at lower levels it would work very well. I've been as low as 80k health and 1.5k overall regen and it was still working very well. This with around 3k armor and mid-600 resists.
This setup has great synergy in that:
a) pets get a ton of life from your health pool (in my case 35k extra health for dogs / 50 k extra health for Garg) and
your high health drives insane regen through Blood Ritual/Fierce Loyalty combo (1,000 pet regen from those passives alone before looking at regen on gear). The high health also makes for one heck of a Spirit Walk Healing Journey pet heal.
Pets are extremely survivable with this sort of setup through all portions of Act III and IV and you can still get very good damage as well (even with my life/regen stat prioritization, I'm still at 27k dps / 37k dps with 5 stack Soul Harvest). Gear and spec setup in my sig (profile link). Blood Ritual/Fierce Loyalty do enough work that I can use my third passive for damage (Pierce the Viel). Blood Ritual also helps offset the extra mana cost of Pierce which doesn't suck. Again, great synergy and just rolling through Act III right now.
Quick note on PtV: Your pets probably don't put out much more than 10-20% of your total damage, you do the lion's share by design. With bears as a primary dps spell vs. elites, I found my damage output no higher with ptv than without it since I'm limited by mana and not the damage number in my character window.
I'm having better luck with <jungle fort or zombie handler, depending>, fierce loyalty and blood ritual. If you don't have a lot of health to make blood ritual shine, keeping fierce loyalty instead, but keep spirit walk w/ healing journey loaded - it's a 15% heal to yourself + pets every 15 seconds, so the setup is on par with blood ritual if you mash it every cooldown, yet has other benefits including opening up another passive and is more situational.
Might just be me, but while under a certain gear point you really do need Honored Guest (or else some other way to hard-regen mana). I have about a 1k mana pool, 60 standing regen, -9 mana cost on helmet, and Blood Ritual... but I still find myself burning through it with Dire Bats. I know I need to swap to a slower 2H, but can't find a decent one (read: one that will outperform my 912 DPS ceremonial knife and Mojo) just yet for less than a million.
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I'm calling bull crap.
Unless the dogs summoned by a rune or passive ability are weaker than your active skill zombie dog, they get 1 or 2 shotted by charging rhino things in Act 1. I chose the GoD ZD rune that gave a 10% chance for one to be summoned if something dies in that area. This feat is surprisingly difficult post Act 1. And they die so quick, it doesn't matter anyways. The 80% slow rune is still the best for GoD. And mixed with WoZ, it almost feels like cheating.
However, gargantuan with the cleave rune is a wrecking machine. He can do Act 1 himself, without any interaction by me. He still stands in the way of wasps in Act 2 and dies rather suddenly; making his usefulness post Act 1 questionable. The 130% damage is simply overpowered.
Spider Queen is too slow to be effective; but set it on something that stands still and she's a real nuker. That's for sure. But there just aren't enough of these around.
Pets tank exceptionally well, minus the crap that I have in the "things that own our pets" thread. I consider my gear mediocre since I only have 29k damage, but I'm very easily able to make progress through Act 3 now because of how much the dogs shore up my defenses.
Some tricks:
Health Globes RULE with 5 pets, a follower, and yourself. You're getting a shit ton more healing out of them. Use them wisely, they are awesome allies now.
Try using Horrify (Frightening Aspect) on CD to increase your pets survivability if you feel you need it. 100% more armor with 50% uptime is nothing to sneeze at.
Jungle Fortitude + Zombie Handler (more for the extra dog than the extra HPs) is friggen rad. Other WDs are experimenting with high HP builds and Blood Ritual + Fierce Loyalty for insane regen, which also seems to be panning out well. I prefer the 4th dog myself, because it seems to be less gear-dependent, but both are pretty legit.
PtV works very well with pets. The increased mana cost is nothing because, honestly, I am very rarely resummoning them. Why not get 20% more damage from all your dogs and garg? Considering the Garg is a monster it is a very good passive for pet builds.
Don't use Bad Medicine (if you were thinking of it). It reduces the damage pre-cap, which means you get dick from it unless the damage is already under the cap, or BM brings it under the cap. 95%+ of Inferno damage will be absolutely uneffected by Bad Medicine.
I use Fierce Loyalty and Blood Ritual with Leeching Beasts, they regen about 500 per second in my gear (not counting LOH or orbs, which rock).
they do very well with a few exceptions. i have lots of room for upgrading also.
It's very clear that you're gearing incorrectly for pets. Put on some resist all and stack armor and even a shield then just spam Horrify:Frightening Aspect, their stats which are based on your own update dynamically(in real time) instead of being a snapshot of when they were summoned so spamming the 100% extra armor for them on top of stacking armor makes them very impressive. If you need extra healing, the Healing Journey rune does in fact count as regen so it's very helpful to your pets in conjunction with Fierce Loyalty.
So far, this WD build has been plowing through Inferno, only dying because I did something really stupid. I think the pet WD has to have the gear to support the pets otherwise they will get crushed.
My stats All res 350 armor 3k.
I havent tried solo, but in partys they are great.
Nice Equipment!
On a different note I actually die more often then my dogs do in act 3. This is because i only have 25k Health. This is due to the brick wall I have hit called no good drops. I have been on this brick wall for at least 2 months. Now I did look at AH to figure out how much i would need to help me get past this issue and everything starts at 20 million, which i don't have (only 10)
my current build (ignore the head piece as I'm only wearing it for the socket) Here is my Buid. http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/MajorPayne-1202/hero/917411
I can take any opinions to help. thanks
First, I'd consider not using two primaries. I'd take one primary and a second higher-mana spell. I use Roll the Bones and Searing Insects myself, but there are many reasonable options here. I would not pick a purely single-target spell, especially in Act 3. The whole act is a giant swarm of mobs. The number of 30+ kill streaks I get is ungodly. If I were trying to dart stuff down it'd take me a lot longer. Build your character around what it is you will be doing most of. Single-target for bosses will be great and all, but that's not going to make up most of your gameplay.
Secondly, you definitely are glass cannon-ish. See if you can pick up a few cheap int/vit/res all pieces and sacrifice a bit of damage for some survivability. Even something as silly as picking up a shield to use temporarily - something with int, vit, res all would probably swing you enough in favor of survivability to make things work until you can upgrade other pieces.
Thirdly, drop Slam Dance and get SOME kind of utility/survivability CD. You are trying too hard to zerg things. You need something more to help keep you alive than Zombie Dogs. I would highly suggest Spirit Walk, probably with Healing Journey. Your damage is plenty high enough, you don't need the big CD. You have almost 2x the damage I have, so if I can kill with what I have then you can afford to drop some damage to try to stay alive. With your damage, even without Slam Dance, you should be able to kill Act 3 elite packs at a decent clip.
Lastly, drop Wall of Zombies - it just doesn't work all that well with pets - and pick up either Soul Harvest (Siphon in your case, Soul to Waste when you have better survivability) or Horrify (Frightening Aspect). If you pick up Frightening Aspect, use Horrify on CD. It's a 100% boost to armor for 8 seconds with a 16s CD. That will significantly increase your survivability as well as your pets.
Ok, FYI the BBV is normally when i'm with my Barb and DH hunter friends to burn things fast. becuase we also had a scrub with us at the time who was doing 9 k of damage. but you are right i really don't need it. the other 2 items make perfect sense I do have a shield which does have what you are stating just drops me about 19k (but i do need to survive for pets to be effective.) I have used Spirit walk before but it seemed bugged as i would still be trapped behind walls did they fix that?
This setup has great synergy in that:
a) pets get a ton of life from your health pool (in my case 35k extra health for dogs / 50 k extra health for Garg) and
your high health drives insane regen through Blood Ritual/Fierce Loyalty combo (1,000 pet regen from those passives alone before looking at regen on gear). The high health also makes for one heck of a Spirit Walk Healing Journey pet heal.
Pets are extremely survivable with this sort of setup through all portions of Act III and IV and you can still get very good damage as well (even with my life/regen stat prioritization, I'm still at 27k dps / 37k dps with 5 stack Soul Harvest). Gear and spec setup in my sig (profile link). Blood Ritual/Fierce Loyalty do enough work that I can use my third passive for damage (Pierce the Viel). Blood Ritual also helps offset the extra mana cost of Pierce which doesn't suck. Again, great synergy and just rolling through Act III right now.
D3Progress: http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/emberos-1608/Emberos/51824579
I gave it to Amy Pond and havnt gotten it back
Don't really have trouble in act 3 except for extra health/reflect dmg, other than that everything is pretty cake walk.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/sarcophagus-1475/hero/2280509
I'm having better luck with <jungle fort or zombie handler, depending>, fierce loyalty and blood ritual. If you don't have a lot of health to make blood ritual shine, keeping fierce loyalty instead, but keep spirit walk w/ healing journey loaded - it's a 15% heal to yourself + pets every 15 seconds, so the setup is on par with blood ritual if you mash it every cooldown, yet has other benefits including opening up another passive and is more situational.