If you want to gear for crit/crit damage (and perhaps a bit more pickup radius) you can use Acid Cloud. Of course there are pros and cons to both Zombie Charger and Acid Cloud - I personally don't like to be handicapped by positioning so bears have always been a bit tenuous for me to use. The lower coefficient with Acid Cloud allows that crit & crit damage to be less wasteful on farming runs. Acid Rain gives it a humongous area of effect, although you do partially lose out on the DoT portion. Lob Blob Bomb is spammable if that's your thing.
Between Acid Cloud and Zombie Charger it should be possible to find something that works well for you, I'd think. Zombie Bears is definitely the brute force option and probably works a bit better for farming, I'd imagine. Shame I can't get myself to put that spell on my bars, heh.
I have found a small upgrade to the build (depending on your gear).
I found that I didn't really need the Soul to Waste rune on soul harvest since I kill things so quickly it's fairly common to run into another pack of 5+ monsters before 30 seconds. I tried out Vengeful spirit instead and OH MY GOD it's so awesome in a few areas (keep, field, rakkis, crater mostly).
I have what I'd consider lower-quality gear (enough to do Act 3, not enough to faceroll/steamroll it). However, I also made the same change to Soul Harvest runes and I'm greatly pleased with it. I use Acid Cloud (Lob Blob Bomb) myself, but Vengeful Spirit is still far superior on trash, and having a greater uptime on a 5-stack is way better. I find myself actively looking to use it since it causes a pretty significant amount of direct damage, whereas back when it was "just a buff" even though the buff was AWESOME, I just didn't find myself looking to use it much outside of elite packs - I think that's kinda a mental thing really.
EDIT
Its CD synergizes well with Spirit Walk too, which is a big plus depending on positioning.
The problem with Gruesome Feast is that the health-globes do not refresh the counter. They just start a new one.
For example if you have picked up 5 health-globes (maximum), you can't pick up one more to keep the stack at "5" for another 10 seconds. Instead, you have to find 5 health-globes within 10 seconds, every 10 seconds.
I tested this and I had to pick up 3 health globes within 10 seconds, every 10 seconds to get ~300 more DPS than with Pierce the Veil. The problem wasn't my pickup radius (37), it's just that the health-globes didn't drop often enough
Yes, but Gruesome Feast scales far better than PtV does. Go into the WD spreadsheet and drop PtV and then put a 1.5x modifier on your character sheet int value. Your damage jumps significantly at almost every gear level. I mean it's a 6.8k damage increase at my gear level, and my gear isn't exactly something to write home about. Yes, you don't have a 5-stack up permenantly, but it also gives you mana instead of making things cost more mana, which allows you to rock the high-damage stuff even more.
I've been rocking Flash Fire + Lob Blob Bomb and having some very good success with it. I can only imagine how amazing it is going to work with better gear. Flash Fire is disturbingly underrated, especially on 3+ targets. As my gear Improves I plan to migrate to Gruesome Feast & Grave Injustice myself. Granted Acid Rain generally requires more pickup radius than bears, but that extra range is a good thing too, and if you can pick up a nicely-rolled Thing of the Deep you can easily attain some ridiculous pickup radius with just one or two other items.
EDIT
A small comparison of damage differentials between PtV and Gruesome Feast with variable levels of GF stacks, using my current gear with 5 stacks of Soul Harvest (negatives mean GF is a damage loss):
Between Acid Cloud and Zombie Charger it should be possible to find something that works well for you, I'd think. Zombie Bears is definitely the brute force option and probably works a bit better for farming, I'd imagine. Shame I can't get myself to put that spell on my bars, heh.
I have what I'd consider lower-quality gear (enough to do Act 3, not enough to faceroll/steamroll it). However, I also made the same change to Soul Harvest runes and I'm greatly pleased with it. I use Acid Cloud (Lob Blob Bomb) myself, but Vengeful Spirit is still far superior on trash, and having a greater uptime on a 5-stack is way better. I find myself actively looking to use it since it causes a pretty significant amount of direct damage, whereas back when it was "just a buff" even though the buff was AWESOME, I just didn't find myself looking to use it much outside of elite packs - I think that's kinda a mental thing really.
EDIT
Its CD synergizes well with Spirit Walk too, which is a big plus depending on positioning.
Yes, but Gruesome Feast scales far better than PtV does. Go into the WD spreadsheet and drop PtV and then put a 1.5x modifier on your character sheet int value. Your damage jumps significantly at almost every gear level. I mean it's a 6.8k damage increase at my gear level, and my gear isn't exactly something to write home about. Yes, you don't have a 5-stack up permenantly, but it also gives you mana instead of making things cost more mana, which allows you to rock the high-damage stuff even more.
I've been rocking Flash Fire + Lob Blob Bomb and having some very good success with it. I can only imagine how amazing it is going to work with better gear. Flash Fire is disturbingly underrated, especially on 3+ targets. As my gear Improves I plan to migrate to Gruesome Feast & Grave Injustice myself. Granted Acid Rain generally requires more pickup radius than bears, but that extra range is a good thing too, and if you can pick up a nicely-rolled Thing of the Deep you can easily attain some ridiculous pickup radius with just one or two other items.
EDIT
A small comparison of damage differentials between PtV and Gruesome Feast with variable levels of GF stacks, using my current gear with 5 stacks of Soul Harvest (negatives mean GF is a damage loss):
0GF: -6147 damage
1GF: -3324 damage
2GF: -232 damage
3GF: 2859 damage
4GF: 5951 damage
5GF: 9043 damage
The more int you have the more the damage shifts in GFs favor, period. Not even touching the mana gain as opposed to the mana defecit between the two.