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Quote from Antirepublican

Quote from Ruppgu

I think pierce is really crappy unless you have an odd build that relies on one of the primary skills for the main source of damage.

I disagree, I think with the right build and perhaps supplementary items you could get some use out of it.
Sacrifice - Pride for instance can restore your entire mana bar np.
Vision quest would seem to yield and absurd amount of mana if you can keep 4 skills on CD. (especially if it includes mana regen affixes, which are listed as +14 man atm.)

There is also a Hit mana = 12.
Max Mana of +150


The health gained by blood ritual is at lest partially consumed by the health loss component. Its really only worth looking at the 15% mana reduction imo.

True... I guess I didn't fully state my thoughts there, lol. It's only good if you're mana capped (have more mana than you can spend).

You'll be spending 30% more mana if you use pierce which means you will cast 30% less spells but the spells will do 20% more damage. Seems like a crappy deal to me... at the cost of one of your passive slots even.

There is of course, the benefit of doing more upfront damage. If you want to have a burst damage build, pierce is for you. However, realize that you will be giving up a lot of long term dps. It's a bit of a trap passive imo. It sounds good at first look but if you sit down and think about the tradeoffs... it's really not worth it unless your build is made with it in mind (no mana skills, low mana skills).

Consider yourself lucky, you just saved a bunch of money.

So in the past, I've said that Hungry Bats sounds like it is single target damage and most people seemed to agree. However, after watching the Witch Doctor video on the Blizzard site, it looks like they show Hungry Bats and it does do an area effect explosion.

If you look at about 2:25 he casts a firebat that explodes on contact (a fairly big range even... 10 yard radius?)

This would make it very competitive with Dire Bats. I think I would prefer a straight line AoE (and control over the ability) but Hungry Bats does so much more damage! It's a tough call.

I think the biggest problem with the skill-UI system is that they decided to add the elective mode option and to have it off by default. Numerous times while playing the beta, people have asked me how I'm casting x + x spell because they're in the same category. The simple fact that they had to ask this question demonstrates the pure failure that is the skill UI. It wouldn't confuse new players if they kept their categories but at least had it displayed like the skill calc is online. The fact that the in-game UI is different than the skill calc on the official site is just mind-boggling. Whoever thought it was a good idea should be fired.

That's not even talking about the silly categories they made up. Most classes, the categories make 0 sense. Explosive blast is in the "Mastery" category. WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? If they divided it into categories that made sense and helped new players better understand things it would be one thing... but that's not what they did. They confused everyone with the skill UI. Is it that hard to have 3 categories: Generator, Spender, and Defense?

It depends on your definition of useless. All of the skills are useful but some are more useful than others and perform the same task. In my opinion, that makes the skill useless. There will still be useless skills in D3 by that definition.

It also depends on how you define a skill. Are you going to lump together all of the possible runes and call the package a skill or is each individual runed skill a different skill?

I think 4 (maybe all 5) of the Energy Twister glyphs are useless. They don't perform well compared to other AE effects because the skill is random + constantly moves + does low damage per second. There just isn't a good reason to use the skill over something like Blizzard (another damage over time skill). The only possible viable version of the spell is the one that doesn't move (which ironically makes it perform a lot like Blizzard). Even then, I think it'll be useless because if you compare it to blizzard... blizzard has a wider range and depending on the rune you pick, either more damage or less AP cost than twister.

There will always be less useful skills, since in the end, we're really just talking about math formulas. I think they did a good job with the skills in D3 because the choices are fairly close for most skills. There are only a small handful of what I would call, useless skills for each class. Almost every skill has at least 1 rune that sounds viable.

Single target vs line AoE. Dire bats is one of (if not the) best skills the WD has.

Hungry Bats is a good single target nuke... but I'd MUCH rather have line AoE

Quote from Kyoob

I would see a problem in lack of proper DPS skill. Firebomb is only 85% weapon damage. And you have no other damaging spell (GotD damage portion is a joke, just small bonus). You will have problems dealing with champion packs and bosses (imagine for example teleport affix monster, now your GotD is virtually useless), if pyromancer is your theme, maybe get firebats? Looks pretty... fiery.

Yep yep... when making a build, always ask yourself the following questions:

1.) Will I be mana capped? The skills that do more damage are the ones that take more mana. If you're wasting mana by being mana capped, you're throwing damage out the window.
2.) Will I be out of mana and be forced to cast nothing for any period of time?

should be doable.

I made it better though http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#acYdeT!ZX!aZaZaa

I'm not sure why you'd want grasp (beyond the extra damage) since you'll always be in melee range doing firebats. You won't be kiting. Haunt makes this build awesome though. Haunt a few enemies and then start spamming firebats... the heals from haunt should keep you alive.

Quote from sacridoc

Pretty sure this is how this stuff works, but correct me if I'm wrong about something...

1) Dire Bats is a nuke, not a channeled spell I believe.

2) Dots / channeled spells work off fixed intervals. In general, it's been said that the interval is 0.5sec, but Rapid Fire for example has much faster intervals. These intervals don't change based on weapon speed.

What they mean in the Blue Post is that if you have a weapon that does 200 damage / 2sec using a 100% skill, if the cycle is 0.5sec, it will do 50 damage every cycle, and take 2sec to do the full damage of the skill. As opposed to if you did 200 damage / 1sec, it would take 1sec to do full damage (over 2 cycles). But in both situations your DPS is what it should be.

And in terms of moving around while firing, a higher attack speed isn't really better unless you're saying that it somehow triggers the casting animation faster, but I wouldn't expect that to save much time really. If you cast a channeled spell for 0.5sec, you'll do the same damage no matter what your attack speed is, as long as the weapon damage is the same. Because 250 damage w/ 2.0 attack speed = 500 damage w/ 1.0 attack speed. And over 0.5sec you'll do 250 damage in both cases.

3) However, the dot / channeled spell damage works off your DPS so the faster the weapon, the more damage you'll do, the more mana you'll spend. The Wizard and Witch Doctor don't have generators typically, so faster weapons probably aren't as good for them because the general idea is that with a faster weapon you spend resource quickly, but you generate it quickly too. This is less true for the Wizard and Witch Doctor.

4) Proc abilities / Life Per Hit is going to have an internal cooldown or some kind of penalty that makes it so abilities like Rapid Fire aren't so powerful.

5) I would expect that pet damage works the same as dots / channeled spells. The pets have a fixed attack interval that cannot be altered, but their damage will increase if you increase your attack speed without losing damage.

6) Basically, it usually doesn't matter much whether your weapon is slow or fast, it's just that fast weapons should work better for proccing stuff and using abilities that don't have cooldowns, like Fetish Sychophants for example. And slow weapons are better for something like Sacrifice.

7) The key in all of this is finding out how the penalties / internal cooldowns work for Life Per Hit and all On-Proc abilities. Only when you do that can you really know what weapon speed is best for your build...

Right, I believe that's how it works but doesn't that prove that slow weapons are the best for casters? Nukes are based on weapon damage so you will do more damage with the limited amount of resource that we have.

lol... please stop saying your opinion instead of actually comparing the numbers. It's not easy to compare build vs build... but let's give it a shot beyond just saying x is better! Keep in mind, it's difficult to calculate dps for lines and close range aoe. I am assuming a line spell for a melee class won't be as good as a close range radius AoE (which is a safe assumption). The exact number of monsters each skill will hit will vary of course.

Wizard Damage
235% Spammable AoE about 10 yards (which will hit 3-4 monsters on average to be 705-940 DPS.. 822 avg)
337% avg from spamming Spectral Blades (Assuming it will hit 2-3 on avg)
Not enough information about Archon to make an estimation, I'll completely disregard this even though it's a large increase of DPS when it's active.
Lets go with an uptime of 3/4 Sleet Storm 1/4 Spectral Blades.
(882+882+882+337) / 4 =745 DPS
vs.
Monk Damage
240% + 33% if buffs active (line AoE Spender (aka, once every 5 attacks) The problem is... it's a melee character doing a line aoe. Line aoe's are great for ranged classes because you can line it up. Line AoE's are so-so for melee because the monsters are surrounding you so that they can attack. They aren't lined up very nicely due to this and you often only hit 2-4 monsters (sometimes more though). I'll even give the benefit of the doubt here and say you have your buffs active to make it (546-1092 DPS.. 819 avg)

When you're generating spirit
140 + 33 = 173 DPS for 2 hits
250 + 33 = 283 hitting about 2-4 monsters = 566-1132DPS (849 DPS avg)
For ease of use... we'll see 6 normal attacks and then a tail kick
173+173+849+173+173+849+819 = 3209/7=458DPS

Damage Conclusion
458 vs the 745DPS avg from the Wizard. I'm not counting the dodge mantra because it says "chance" to do 35% damage so I'm not sure which numbers to use. It wouldn't add much more than 10-20 DPS though.

Surviveability
Ward + Blades vs Heal = slight nod to Monk (Heal comes out to be 413 health/sec if you spam it exactly on cooldown (which is an unreasonable assumption) + it spends spirit). Ward is 310 and it's difficult to say how much blades will be but I doubt it'll be 100 health/sec.

20% DR from Blur
65% Increased armor from energy Shield = How much DR would this be? I honestly have no idea. It depends on armor scaling which we don't know much. Would it be safe to say 10% DR?
Frost Nova to stun for 3 seconds every 9 seconds (a 33% uptime)
40% increased armor when Archon is cast
30% DR after a teleport for 4 seconds
vs
30% DR
15% dodge
25% less damage for some enemies (very hard to calculate). You have 0 radius AoE skills so only enemies in a line will be doing 25% less damage. On average, you could say 3 enemies are attacking your front arc and only 1 of them has the debuff.

The DR cancel each other out. I'm going to say the situational surviveability cancel each other out as well (teleport and Archon vs 25% less damage debuff). I'm sure you'll claim that you can somehow debuff every enemy even though all of your skills are straight line or single target... it's a non factor.

So really it comes down to 15% dodge vs 33% uptime stun. 33% of the time taking no damage or 15%... which one is higher?

Survivability Conclusion
Very slight nod to Monk due to healing


Also, a lot of those abilities help the entire group (aka would help the wizard too) and won't stack with other classes debuffs (the 25% less damage debuff).

If you want to say you are more valuable because you help out the group more, I agree 100%. I think you are discounting the wizard too much if you say he'll do crappy damage and won't be able to survive though.

Disclaimer... the above math doesn't prove anything, there are tons of assumptions... it's a heck of a lot better than just throwing out opinions though and I think at the very least it proves that you'll put out respectable.

If you disagree with these, I can rerun the numbers.
Assumptions:
2-3 monsters hit with spec blade
3-4 monsters hit with radius AoE (sleet storm)
2-3 monsters hit with line AoE cast by melee class
75% sleet storm uptime with absorption energy armor rune
65% increased armor = 10% DR

It's all about forum culture and it seems that on the various Curse sites the flaming, aggressive arguments, and trolling are expected and possibly even encouraged to some degree. There are several other high user forums on the internet that do not have this issue but it's a combination of culture and some pretty dedicated moderation staff. Not digging the mods here but if you want to drive behavior you have to show people consequences for actions. It's basic human behavior.

I will reference PA because I like it, and it's one of the best run forums on the net. Several years ago it was starting to fall apart and they instituted a simple and honestly silly global rule. They called it the Glorious Edict. The only tolerated "insult" was to call someone a Silly Goose. If you said anything else there were consequences, jail and up to banning. I know it sounds stupid but it worked. They also run a pretty tight ship across the board. Want some ideas, look here http://bit.ly/LNeQVJ.

Again, my intent is not to rip on the staff or the culture here. I like it here, but I think there are some things that could improve and would make it better. Hopefully things will change because as was already said the tone around here is degrading into official forums territory pretty quickly.