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when I messed with it, rhen'ho didn't really increase single target damage, which explains what you saw on ghom. The toads just hit and "pierce" for x1 damage on single. but trash packs get hit multiple times by multiple explosions.

I personally find your argument very convincing Willemh, especially due to my own experience with SMK.

Because attack speed doesn't increase dot damage, most of BBV is wasted for a dot doctor with starmetal.

Goal: a setup that is more efficient than others based on real gameplay/numbers, with higher survivability, that requires far less gear than others.

Hello, I'm a long time "hard-core" gamer from other games and I love math (tho this game keeps turning up hidden mechanics). There are two ideas to keep in mind! Less kiting = more dpsing. Ability to cast across screen and past walls is better uptime than using short range, mana limited spells.

This was originally inspired by my attempts to take down Maltheal on Torment 6. I lucked into The Furnace very early (but this build isn't based around that) which does a great job of pushing him to low health quickly, but then it took several minutes to finish him off in which you are easily insta-gibbed by clouds put under you and his stunning charge (I had low dps and just 4.5M base toughness at the time). I decided to treat this problem like I do any heroic encounter -- ask yourself how to mitigate every major event.

For normal rifting I was doing a poison damage + zombie bears build for quite a while, but found the build listed here much faster. Zombie bears seem like great damage on paper, but have such limited range (and high mana cost) that their dps uptime is severely limited. Also this setup allows you to slot +20% damage and not have mana issues. I clear T4 very speedily with this setup with essentially 0 chance of dying. T5 is also safe feeling, but slower so I usually don't bother. I have cleared whole act bounties, bosses, and rifts in T6.

Talents/Skills:http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#geUlhX!fWSV!bZabaY
How to get free zombie dogs - The 4th passive is optional - I often use circle of life to get 3 dogs then change it to either fetish sycophants, grave injustice, jungle fortitude, or bad medicine (for groups) The dogs do not despawn when the talent is changed. Spirit vessel is quite useful for a super high torment boss you're challenging yourself on.
* I use locusts: pestilence because they spread so much faster, and often are able to spread to places searing locusts will not if eg monsters are coming from several directions. Since my dots proc weapon abilities for me with eg furnace/TF pestilence tends to kill things much faster for me than searing.
* I prefer spiritbarrage-phantasm for several reasons. See math section 4 posts down.
*Pirhanas - frozen pirhanas is as good or better in some situations now that we're not running grave injustice.

My profile: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/justus-1571/hero/118874

The main idea
Mitigation
Between Spirit walk (3s immunity) and Horrify (8s of around +60% toughness) -- you have very high uptime on super high mitigation. EG horrify would toss me from 9.5M me up to 15M toughness, and you can optionally use a talent that lowers CD like grave injustice. Your dogs are also soaking part of your damage w/offhand. The spells used also crowd control with cold slows, and fear.

Damage
Math* -- look a couple posts down from this one, and throughout thread there are good posts.
I find that kiting less/none makes things die far far faster than they do for myself or friends who put in 150k more damage in exchange for half their toughness. They are slaughtered in T4+ while I can stand in fire, chuckle, and dps while they run around trying to stay alive until their health potion is up again.
Open with pirhanas (otherwise dots do not get the 15% unless recast), cast locusts if there are 5monsters+ (otherwise haunts first), haunt everything you can, keep your x3 phantasms down. If you have a weapon that procs damage like thunderfury/odyn, then haunt spam procs extremely high amounts of weapon damage procs. Phantasm can also proc your weapon's more than once per cast, and locusts have a chance to proc every time they spread. Furthermore Dots have a chance to apply the ability from a weapon like "The Furnace" on every tick.

This leads to a fairly instant cast playstyle where you can put up your dots + phantasms on the main pack, then proceed to haunt enemies around the room. If you are feeling overly tanky you can always swap out one of your two mitigation abilities to put in more damage.

Items - most useful (still a great setup without this).
1. Quetzalcoatl hat - double locust/haunt damage
IMO it is still a decent setup without this, but you will be limited in torment, the hat is a 40%-60% damage upgrade. Kadala is RNG, but fortunately this has a similar chance to drop to most WD hats.

Very useful items, that you can craft!
Craftables: +cold-weapon (Utar's roar), legs, feet, gloves, wrist, chest, shoulder, belt, off-hand.
1. Ashera's set (gloves/boots/legs): 100 resist, 20% life, all 3 followers appear often even in multiplayer. The followers contribute buffs (+3% damage on crit, +1.8% crit, +3% attack speed, +3%damage taken by monsters in puddle), furthermore they heal you, CC, distract monsters, do damage, and proc legendary powers from their items. Also elites hexed by Enchantress stay hexed the full 5seconds. I would use hex instead of attack speed aura due to dot mechanics.
2. Aughild's set (shoulder and wrist): -7% melee/ranged damage taken, +15% elite damage -15% elite damage taken
3. Other set such as craftable Demon's or Blackthorne (chest, belt): kadala gives out blackthorne, it is very common.

Other great options
Weapon: The usual Odyn/thunderfury, The Furnace, Azurewrath, Shard of Hate.
*Rhen'ho flayer (now that we get fetish, exploding toads have a super high proc rate with flayer and high damage even without +fire on gear. I would replace phantasm with toads if Rhen'ho flayer were your best available weapon).

Offhand: Ukhapian serpent (sends 25-30% of damage to zombie dogs). Thing of the deep (+20yd pickup radius) nice for high torment that dogs just can't survive on and will help buff your grave injustice and ability to pickup health globes. Homonculus will summon dogs for you as fast as they're killed on T5-T6, and at least they provide some distraction.
Belt: String of ears belt (large melee mitigation, ultra useful), or hwoj (locust swarm slows enemies 60-80%), or Lord Harrington/Witching-hour.
Neck: +Cold + crit + cd etc. Depending on your gear 10% crit may be better than +20% cold in this slot (and both of those two better than other stats), weapon procs like thunderfury will scale with your crit but not cold.
Ring1: of royal grandeur - set bonuses count as you having one more item, from horadric caches in Act 1
Ring2: stone of jordan +cold +elite etc. Tall Man's Finger is worthy of note for high torment (see below).
Gloves: Frostburn can be amazing with +10-15%cold and 35-45% chance to freeze enemies instead of chill them (most of our spells chill). Very rare drop.
Feet: Ice Climbers - immune to jailer/freeze. Very rare drop.

*Best mitigation pieces for Torment 6, if you didn't care about losing some ring damage, are likely to be string of ears + ukhapian serpent + tall man's finger ring. Because the mega zombie dog has 1.6million health vs. the 60k of normal dogs (summon via circle of life then swap passive), I've found this dog does survive on T6 for me against most monsters. The mega zombie now does more than triple the combined damage of normal dogs.

Fun facts about Dots
1. They don't scale with attack speed, at all, except for increase how fast you can cast them on more targets. Thus you can safely roll attack speed off your items into more useful stats like vitality or crit/crit-damage.This applies to many other spells too like grasp of the dead because it does "weapon damage" not based on sheet damage.
2. Crit chance and crit damage are averaged then multiplied by base dot damage. Eg 1+ (40%crit * 400%cd) = 2.6. So with 40% crit and 400% crit damage your dots do 260% more damage.
3. All damage from haunt/locusts/phantasm add up and shows one damage number once per second.
4. Since they don't scale with attack speed, they do more damage with a good 2hander than a 1hander+offhand. But offhand +10% crit and +skill bonus usually make 1handers equal-ish. Especially at lower gear levels a 2hander may be better.
6. Phantasm, haunt, and locusts all seem to follow this mechanic.

Upsides
Items are easier to come across than other builds, and mostly craftable.
I clear T4 very fast with this setup. And now clear T5 very quickly with the fetish sycophant change. I do have an amazing starmetal kukri (and carnevil mask), or 4set zuni that can be used -- but find both of these to be slower, clunkier,and less secure builds for my items. Think about how phantasm and haunt can be cast literally at the edge of your screen and often through some gates/walls - high dps uptime and low kiting means you do more damage than you might assume.
Vampire bats in pet build has the same drawbacks of zombie bears -- short range and obnoxious to use. Also pet builds do not benefit from area damage, whereas phantasm/locusts/haunt do.
You can feel good about rerolling attack speed into vitality or other damage stats ;).

Caveats
My own gear/setup changes (like anyone's).
Edit: even with some of the proper gear pet build seems to do worse in many situations - not that I wouldn't replace spirit-walk or horrify with fetish army for faster clears if I had Zuni 4piece that did not require losing quetzcoatl.
To quickly clear Torment6 you need special set items of course, but even without them you can do T6 with good gear for this build (more than half of which can be crafted). There are comments in this thread attesting to this =D.
Pet build is very strong though for single target since the minions benefit from attack speed -- I do find dot build to be better overall, but pets are better at zerging down a couple lone elites. If you have all of the good items for a specific set like pets, that will be better of course.

When I tested it, it seemed that the big dog does a bit more than x3 as much as the others combined (scaling with # of dogs you would have had).

The auras are not affected afaik, just the bite is tripled. Though if you would have had 5 dogs before putting on the ring - his fire aura will be base 100% weapon damage (five dogs x 20% each), but it is not multiplied again by the additional ~320% the ring gives. Leeching beast still just give x1 life on hit though.

In other words, it's best to use whatever kind of dogs you have +elemental gear for. Fire dog's bite now is fire since this patch(tested and confirmed this), poison dog's bite should be poison, and the others physical.

example: with my crappy gear and what would be 5 dogs (with a tiny bit of +fire). Melee bite crit 40million, fire-aura crit 5 million. it's pretty obvious the aura is not getting the ring buff from that, otherwise it would be doing ~15-18M.

Awesome, thank you I appreciate the feedback. Did you include that not 100% of your damage is cold, and a proc weapon like thunderfury scales with crit but not cold?

Curious, the profile dps shows differently on its face to me, are you taking out attack speed?

**
Schnub, at least for me I would go with
movement speed until you have 25% total (from all sources), then int
crit damage, then crit
whatever defensive
area damage -- this stat is quite useful for clearing clumped packs quickly.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=76M-inqFyHk

sorry no sound its twitch:(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkUdQiEO0Dw

This was the very first legendary helmet I got as a WD at level 60, but it was really crappy and the mimics did so little damage and had such crappy AI that I melted it.

I found one the other day and decided to test it out. I was pleasnetly surprised.

The mimics now do roughly 80% of your damage, they spawn more often, their AI has been vastly improved, and they can do some cool things like cast Piranhas and MULTIPLE spider queens!

The Item: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/the-grin-reaper

The build: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#fbYlUd!YUXe!cZaZZa

So after my comment a couple days ago I set to get the craftables I needed, since I already had my 20% cold ammy, I managed to put the set together witch 35% cold and an extra 23% to haunt and started trying the build with progressive difficulty scaling, I must say it's an awesome build, it delivers as you would expect, I ended up with only 600k sheet dps, wich comes up to 850k while ingame, but with that I was able to clear a T6 rift in 35 mins, so I'm gonna keep using it for a long time (until I find either zuni's or jade's set to toy with).

I did made a few changes while scaling the diff, I'm also using frozen piranhas to get a little bonus fro cold% and I usually set them on the floor and lay 3 phantasms and everything kinda stucks there, because of the shorter cd of frozen piranhas I removed Grave Injustice and got Gruesome Feast in, just to get a bit more dmg in. As for actives I realized it strongly depends on diff level, up until T5 I was using Soul Harvest and Mass Confusion in place of Horrify and Spirit Walk, since in T4, if I got cornered, I could always kill something and make a hole before I died, at that point I switched to Spirit Walk (Healing Journey) and Zombie Dogs (Life Link), since dmg on T5 and T6 gets awfully bursty for your dogs and I'd rather have a way to bringing them up immediatly, plus the life link helps a lot.

That said, grats on an awesome guide for an awesome build, keep it up =)

Those numbers are straight off Diabloprogress so only apply to cold damage specifically. Depending on the proportion of your damage that is not cold, that number changes. If only 80% of your damage is cold, crit chance is already ahead of cold damage ( 118877 dps for 20% cold VS. 125229 dps for 10% crit). The breakpoint is around 90% Cold damage, though someone could math out the exact percentage.

Edit: This breakpoint also shifts depending on the existing cold damage you have. At around +50% cold damage, 10% crit is just flat out better, even with 100% of your damage being cold damage. This is because cold damage is additive with itself, where as other dps stats are increased in value by your added cold damage. +20% cold damage has the same dps value at 0% and 2000% +cold damage, but CC/CHD/AS all increase in value as you gain more cold damage.