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do you think we will be dissapointed with the class changes comming soon™.

will the mana as a resource really be fixed?

will vision quest be balanced?

will our useless passives be fixed?

will our pets be viable?

will they break the working LoH and CC proc rates to make things unviable? (fire pit, acid cloud, pet cc ect)

will sacrifice be viable?

will our cast animation be speeded up?

will zunimazas 4p bonus become mana on hit instead of kill?

and alot of other things, so will WD be better in 1.0.4 or will it just dissapoint us.

I know for fact that a vocal few will be disappointed, pretty much no matter what Blizz does. For myself, as long as the changes step in the right direction and keep WDs relatively in step with the other classes (or slightly better on improvements, since they're the least-played class), I'll be happy. Lots of ways to do it, and any one (or two, or seven) of them will end up net positive for the class as a whole.

ofc, im just hoping that the fix more things that they break.

as they said, they'll balance a lot of stuff
I just hope we get more CC working on inferno and dots that are worth using...
and useful pets...

our class is the only one that could have a pet oriented build and we can't use them cause they are lame

some things i would love to see,

fierce loyality as base pet skill and them scaling with Vit

spell costs revorked so that they are 1/3 of that they are now and reworking vision quest to 25-33% mana regen per CD, i was promised a deep mana pool and i wannt it :P. (primary is fine with this model toads could be 25)

sacrifice should be redisigned to give us an armor buff instead, say armor as base, R1 armor+ resist, R2 resist only, R3 damage increase, R4, 33% health and mana per dog exploded deals damage. R5, dog respawn and dealing damage and make it 25% chance to fail resummon a dog.

rest of the spells is fine when we can cast em for less mana, easyer to stack dots and damage sources.

some runes needs reworking mostly zombie charger. runes needs to be more in line with each other.

wall of zombies - dead rush and pile on needs reduced cd to 5-6 seconds. (can be reduced to 2-3 with gear)

Can think of more stuff but if they make anything similar to this. WD will probably be the most diverse and enjoyable class in the game.

If they fix mana I will be overjoyed. Beyond that I don't care that much (although usable pets in a nuke spec would be sweet). I would LOVE it if they fixed all the bugs with spirit vessel but I doubt they will.

I just hope they don't mess with (nerf) builds that people currently play and enjoy. Tank Doctor, VQ Builds, etc. With our luck, they will nerf all the popular builds right now and make new builds that are viable but even less powerful than the previous VQ builds

Quote from Vomica

do you think we will be dissapointed with the class changes comming soon™.

will the mana as a resource really be fixed?

Mana as a resource is fine.

will vision quest be balanced?

Vision Quest is fine

will our useless passives be fixed?

Our passives are quite useful

will our pets be viable?

Pets are viable....to a point. It would be nice for them to live a bit longer in Inferno but I'd be fine if they didn't change them.

mana as the resource is fine, mana regen is fine spell cost is not fine.

or the other way around

mana is nto fine mana regen is not fine and spell costs are fine.

one of them needs fixing.

sure vision quest fixes it with a huge paycheck of having to select 4 skills with CD and activate em just to get mana <--- this is not good design.

witch doctor should be playable without using VQ, or only using primarys. im not saying that it need buffing to the point where you can use your high mana abillitys constantly. but atleast so that you can use em more then once every 5 seconds.

i calculated the absolute maximum mana regen on can get with the spirutal attunement passive. 73.8 mana per second. with 1786 max mana.

and to even get that you need a cermonial knife witch is 1.4 APS. lets say with bire bats witch costs (123-10 = 113 mana with skill reduction) that times the APS 1,4*113=158 Mana per second. and will let you cast bats for 21 seconds. if we take bears instead make it half the duration.

73.8 mps would replenish your 1786 mana in 24 seconds, and thats while not casting any primarys like darts, spiders or fire bombs.

this type of gearing is pretty insane tho as you need a total of 7 perfectly rolled max mana stats on your gear. so its not practical.

and this is the reason all high mana abillitys is forced to use the VQ passive.

hence mana regen or spell costs are broken and needs to be fixed.

Lets not turn this into a mana is broken/mana is fine discussion. Many people feel mana is lacking something in the game right now so let them voice their opinion in a thread about what they want from the next patch.

im sorry for my negativity i guess. but alot of our problems starts with our mana, another thing is some of our poorly designed skills and runes. but every class have some of these so it does not mather to much.

one other major thing that i think WDs will need is a speeded up cast animation for a lot of skills.

Quote from pewpew

Quote from Vomica

ofc, im just hoping that the fix more things that they break.

<-- with a general attitude like this, i can't take you serious anymore

it is usually like this they work and fix some parts of a system and some other part in the chain breaks.

some examples that is likley going to happen. the fix mana in some way but in the procces build using todays VQ build might not survive = unlimited spam removed.
another thing is that they will tweak LoH and CC procs from spells, and that might break WDs healing and CC procing to survive. even if this means pets is viable as meat shields after the patch.

The biggest problem i have with my WD is, it seems like if i go glass cannon, it still isn't as hard hitting as dh/wizard. But if we go balanced we have nothing that increases our resistances or armor enough to where our low dps is covered by how much we can tank.

It seems as if we're weaker than average in everyway. I think either poison darts needs a buff ( more dmg somehow ). Or Bears have longer range ( if we have no EHP buff ). Or give Jung fortitude to add resistances.

There just isn't anything with a WD that says we can do THIS better than this class. The only thing it seems we got going for us is we just look absolutely badass

Also i think that maybe intel should add to our mana pool.

jungle fortitude reduces all damage taken by 20%, so if you have 60% reduction from armor and 60% reduction from resists. you will have a total of 1-0,8*0,4*0,4= 0,872 reduction opposed to 1-0,4*0,4=0,84 without it
100k hit vs 87,2% = 12,8 k
100k hit vs 84% = 16 k
and if you scale of 20% of 16k you get 12,8k.

but yes indeed to be a melee/caster hybrid we really lack some longer duration armor or resistance armor/spell/buff
dogs has a verry interesting rune tho the one giving 10% damage reduction. just to bad the dogs even with that rune runs of to the nearest pack 1.5 screens away making it pretty useless.


RESOURCE: MANAWitch doctors’ inborn connection to the Unformed Land allows them to tap into a deep well of spiritual energy, called Mana.Mana is a vast but slowly-regenerating resource;


this is taken from the official game guide stating that WDs mana pool is deep and vast. the only skill that makes it feel this way is CD abillitys and plauge of toads and to an extent haunt and spirit barage with ruse of essence. i want this deep and tactical recource they are talking about and not the cast 3-4 spells and run around for 30-50 seconds waiting for it to be full again.

I don't think we will be disappointed. As others have said as long as mana is improved I think you will be amazed at the functionality increase of many builds.

Skeptical but open. Ill at least give it a try and see how much more itemization will play into "proper" builds.

Im more worried about how magic find is "Evolving". /worry

I'm still very hopeful, but not touching my WD until the patch. My frustration with the class grows every time I get another character to 60 (three down, two to go).

I would be overjoyed to be able to use a pet-centric build in act2+ inferno (without using a cc gimmick build), but I would settle for having more petless builds become viable. Mana as a resource doesn't bother me. I think they could quite easily tweak regen and spell costs to offset it's weaknesses.

so im currently leveling a WD and im trying to understand what people mean by FIX MANA.What exactly is wrong with it? Im guessing the cost of spells is to much considering the amount of mana u have to work with?

Quote from v3ter4n

so im currently leveling a WD and im trying to understand what people mean by FIX MANA.What exactly is wrong with it? Im guessing the cost of spells is to much considering the amount of mana u have to work with?

phuz hit the key points but it really boils down to Pierce the Veil and Vision Quest.

To be competitive with dps (compared to other classes) you'll need to use pierce the veil. The problem is... this makes the mana problem even worse and the only solutions are VQ or spamming a primary skill (typically splinters).

Other classes have multiple self buffs to increase their dps. For example, Wizards have glass cannon, familiar and magic weapon. WDs only have Pierce and it makes our build choices VERY limited. That's the problem.

//edit: You could possibly count soul harvest as a self buff.... but it's not up 100% and it requires risky play to get off.

Would buffing the skill increase or decrease build diversity? Some skills when buffed cause other skills to become obsolete, so there’s a net decrease in build diversity - we’re more careful with those. Other skills, when buffed, add to the total pool of appealing skills, which increases build diversity. The most obvious example here is the Witch Doctor Zombie Dogs and Gargantuan, which are both receiving significant improvements in 1.0.4.

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

I hope "significant" really lives up to its promise!